Mystique
by WelcomeToTheMadness
Summary: Many know Helen of Troy, but few remember her sister Klytemnestra, who married into the accursed Atreid dynasty of Mycenae. Abandon hope all who enter here; brace yourselves for a tale of lust, madness, unspeakable horror, and one woman's struggle for survival.
1. Chapter 1

The fire moves from Mount Ida in Troy to the rock of Lemnos and the crag of Athos. Skimming high above the Aegean, it shot across to Makistos, bright as a moon on the cliff of Kithairon. It flashed over Gorgon's Lake, and by the time it reached Aigiplanktos, it had become a beard of flame that overleapt the Saronic Gulf and swooped onto the peak of Arachnaios. No sign from the fire-lord Hephaistos, this; the thing that excites me sets my teeth on edge too.

We were roused from our beds mere moments ago by a harried watchman, the same poor man I set atop my roof a decade ago, to bring me news, when my sister—Helen the harlot of Sparta—fled Achaea with her Trojan lover, and my husband went after her. My bleary-eyed family huddles on the balcony off my bedroom; I stand out in my skin-tight black silk nightgown, the lone wide-eyed raven in a flock of sleepy seagulls. 

"Father's coming home!" Elektra crows.

"Is that a fact?" I say, my back still turned.

Elektra's eyes—_gods,_ they look just like Agamemnon's!—narrow at me in that superior smirk of my husband's that I never could abide. "He is! He is! He is!" she says in a mocking sing-song. "He's gonna come home and kill you, you faithless slut!"

I take my time in turning around. Acknowledging this creature that supposedly sprung from my womb takes effort and I do it with my teeth clenched. Elektra's belly pooches out, straining against the white linen of her nightgown. I tighten my mouth into a disapproving smirk; like her father, she always ate more than her share at feasts. This daughter is mine and yet so foreign to me that relation seems an unsolvable mystery.

Actually carrying this demon in my body is unthinkable, yet I remember too well the mornings spent clutching the rim of the toilet-bowl as the seed of my rapist pounded its fists against the lining of my stomach. She hated me even then, I realize. I study her closely, trying to see the part of me everyone says is there, but all I can see is the face of the man I've spent a decade trying to forget. Elektra giggles in perverse delight. I backhand her.

"You better run, you coward!" she yells without warning. My hands curl into fists at my sides— fists I'm about to swing at her—until I glance at the door leading from my bedroom and realize she wasn't yelling at me. A glorious burst of flame licks the sky, spotlighting Aegisthus Thyestides as he stalks onto the balcony in only a loincloth.

Serpentine curls writhe about his face, drape lazily over his back and chest. The pillow-creases on one side of his face show that he's just now gotten up yet his look is one most men spend hours trying for. His is not the hardened body of a warrior, but the soft and sensual one of a man who spends his days between sheets. _My_ sheets, for these past ten years.

Fingers through which lightning flows slip up around my waist, sending a jolt through me when they come to their familiar resting-place on my hips. Aegisthus lays his chin on my shoulder, murmurs, "So he's coming." If a lion could talk, he would sound like Aegisthus. Every time he says something, I have to wait a minute for the spell to break so I can talk again. "First time he ever did anything I asked," I mumble, eyes going back to the fire.

Aegisthus smirks, remembering my honey-coated request to my husband that he light a chain of beacons from Troy to bring me news of his homecoming. "How appropriate that he leads himself to his doom."

The cry of my son chokes back my reply.

Baby Agathon torn from my arms, cradled in the monstrous hands of a man already stained by my young husband's blood… Agamemnon Atreides shifts my son in his arms, draws his hands back with my child's head between them—I feel the impact of beefy hands crushing a fragile skull. I shake like I did that late winter night when Agamemnon tenderly laid my baby's body in the dirt and walked over him. A little arm comes off. The head is further flattened. There's the terrible squelch of flesh. I don't realize I'm screaming until Aegisthus closes his hand over my mouth. I hate the taste of his hand-lotion too much to bite.

"Shh…" Aegisthus whispers, turning my face into his shoulder.

"My baby…!" I gasp, crazy-sobbing as I try to get away. "I have to hold him… He's so hurt…"

Aegisthus' eyes soften as he pulls me back to look in my eyes. "Agathon's dead, Klytie," he says very slowly. "Agamemnon killed him twenty-two years ago."

I slither out of his embrace, walk over to the edge of the balcony, searching the streets below for a sign of my husband and baby. "Then why…?" I search my lover's eyes for answers. "Why did it seem so real again, Aegisthus?"

He comes back to me again, like he can't say anything without touching me, but I know what he's really doing. Aegisthus is a human monster; his food is my fear. Of course he touches me at my weakest. He is desperate for the rush my pain brings him, and he can masquerade as the comforting lover. It is, in every way, the perfect setup for Aegisthus, as my whole life has been for the past ten years.

"Because he died on a night like this, didn't he, Klytie? With fire…and an army…and Agamemnon."

I grab a hunk of my black hair in either hand, tear at it while I scream. And while I scream, the fire rages on and Agamemnon Atreides comes closer. With my eyes fixed on the road, I move my hands in the curse that calls the Erinyes. "You come," I whisper as the procession makes its way into town. "And I will make you hurt."


	2. Chapter 2

**22 Years Earlier**

I saw him—the freckle-faced boy at his father's side, smirking at me across the smoky Megaron. He makes a face at me; I stick out my tongue. _I'm not so sure I like you either! _My father, completely oblivious to the silent battle being waged across the room, turns to me with his brilliant smile, the one that masks a heart as cold and hard as marble, and says, "Klytemnestra, why don't you take Agamemnon outside and show him the garden? You two can play while I talk to Atreus."

I am ten. I don't _play. _And in spite of some hallucination at my birth that led him to put some god-awful gibberish down in stone forever, my name is not _Klytemnestra, _it's Klytie! My jaw drops and my eyes widen slightly. My father narrows his in response, just enough for only me to notice. I know that look well. This is the one I get most often, the one that means _Behave or I'll have your hide in a sling! _He can make me obey him but he can't make me like it! I flip my hair in the strange boy's direction, shrug my shoulders as I head for the door. I don't talk often.

Conversations in my house mostly include my big brothers and twin sister clamoring without pause about everything from their studies to sports to which boy Helen (my boy-crazy twin) dragged behind the gymnasium to kiss.

Occasionally, there is a lull in the conversation in which somebody remembers my existence and asks, "Klytie, what do you want for dinner?" and I say, "Food." That is the extent of my talking. This boy isn't worth the breath I would waste.

He shuts the Megaron door behind him—loudly enough to make me jump—and follows me out into the garden. His quick brown eyes glance over the space, judging it in one flicker of an eyelid. "This isn't very interesting."

"Neither are you." The words slip out before I can call them back, but I'm not sorry. He actually smiles at that, infuriating me. And though I refuse to agree with him, I have never found the garden particularly interesting myself. I have no idea what I am expected to show him.

He grins, sensing my confusion. "Adults don't have a clue." Truest thing that's been said all day. I dip my head in acknowledgement. He waits another moment for me to speak and when he finally realizes I'm not going to respond, asks, "Is Klytemnestra really your name?"

"No," I muttered, back still turned, "it's the mumbling of an idiot."

He snickers. "But is it _really?" _

I narrow my eyes and turn toward him just slightly. "So what if it is?"

He shrug, still grinning like an idiot. "It sounds like a disease."

I had always thought so myself, but coming from him, the statement is maddening. It gets under my skin like nothing has in a while. "Take it back," I said through my teeth.

He tosses his head. "Make me."

I'm on top of him, pinning him to the ground, before he even knows what hit him. To his credit, it doesn't take him long to recover; he delivers a punch that hits me square in the jaw and has me seeing double. But I am on a wrestling team and I highly doubt he's ever had any kind of training.

The thought fuels my fire and I light into him, pummeling him harder and harder as we grapple across the garden. Then he makes his biggest mistake. I go for his eyes and he throws up his hands—the coward!

I grab his wrists and slam him to the ground pinning him with a fist while rising to victory on top of his chest. "Ha!" I crowed, jumping down. "I win!"

"You sure do," he says evenly, getting back to his feet. "Where'd you learn to fight like that?" I shrug. Every girl I know canwrestle. He studies me closely, like I'm the two headed calf in the sideshow that came to town with the circus last summer. "I never met a girl who _could _fight!" he says at length.

I laugh. "Where are you from?"

When he says, 'Mycenae," my blood runs cold.

Mycenae: richest city-state in Achaea. Not more powerful, because Sparta has that position and will till the end of time. But definitely a prominent place. _And I just beat up their prince. _

"Did I hurt you?" I ask finally. I think of all the ways my father will punish me, how swift and terrible his wrath will be, and my heart-rate accelerates just slightly.

"No," he says, swiping the blood from his nose. "It was actually nice to have somebody not treat me like a glass figurine!" He smiles shyly, then ducks his head. "I fight with my friends, but everybody's too careful; they're afraid of getting in trouble if they hurt me."

I can see why. Aloud, I say, "So that explains why you can't fight."

He refuses to give me the satisfaction of getting to him, only offers me a smirk. "Maybe you can teach me."

"Maybe," I agree, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. The Spartan sunlight beats down heavy; I pull my hair out of my ponytail and let the faint breeze ripple through my thick black mane. A thought suddenly hits me and my eyes snap open. "How come you're in Sparta?"

All of a sudden, he can't meet my gaze. "My father's here to get help," he says at length.  
"To take Mycenae back."

I was not aware Mycenae had been stolen. "From who?"

"My uncle."

Mycenae's history was rife with blood feuds and treachery, and the one between the brothers Atreus and Thyestes was the most famous of all. _"Again?"_ I ask, gaping.

"Again," Agamemnon echoes wearily.

I take a minute to process this information. "So you're running away!" His head is bowed so far in shame the nod is almost imperceptible. "Did your whole family come?"

"It's just me and my brother and my father."

"What happened to your mother?"

His eyes snap up to my face. "Would you stop asking so many questions!"

"I was just curious," I mutter, slightly wounded. And his reaction said more than an explanation would, anyhow.

"She's dead, isn't she?" I whisper. He bites down hard on his lip and I say very softly, "It's all right, mine is too."

He raises his head just a little, as though considering me in a new light. "What happened to her?"

"She killed herself," I said easily. "Hung herself from a noose in her bedroom." My mother and I had never been close, and with the way she delighted in humiliating me, I had been glad of her death.

"I'm sorry," he says, and he sounds like he means it.

"Don't be," I return, focusing on a spot somewhere beyond his head as I attempt to re-braid my hair. "What happened to yours?"

"My father killed her," he says in a low voice and I can tell he's trying very hard not to cry. "Drowned her in the bathtub."

"_Why?" _I exclaim. I had never heard of anybody doing such a thing. "That's awful!"

He nods, eyes filled with pain. "She betrayed him. It was so…" He knuckles the brimming tears out of his eyes. "So stupid! She said she loved his brother, she…" He sniffs, trying hard to pull himself together. "It wasn't worth it. All of us loved her. We _needed _her! And she threw it all away."

"She didn't," I corrected, _"he _did! Your father didn't have to kill her!" I think of the red-haired man in my father's Megaron with his warm eyes and easy smile and a chill creeps up my spine. "How can you ever feel safe with him now?"

"I don't," Agamemnon whispers. "I'm still mad at him for what he did. I don't know how I'll ever trust him again."

I cannot even imagine a reply to that. _I'm sorry _doesn't even begin to cover what I want to say. But every time I try to put words with my emotions, it gets lost in translation and comes out all wrong. In the end, I say, "There's not much to do out here. You want to see my special place?" He nods. "You can't tell anybody about it," I said harshly, my eyes boring into his.

"I won't," he promises. His brown eyes turn softer as mine harden. "I have special places too." That is all I need to know. We make our way out of the garden and down the hill, walking with the heavy tread of children forced to be adults too quickly.

Trees turned flame gold and vermillion frame our path on both sides; every autumn, Sparta becomes a canvas for the gods to paint. A crisp breeze shakes loose a few brightly-colored leaves. They make their descent in slow, loopy swirls, getting tangled in our hair and darting just out of reach before floating to the ground to join their friends who have met a similar fate.

The sight draws spontaneous laughter from both of us and Agamemnon and I turn to each other in surprise, almost as if expecting to be caught. Looking into his eyes, I see the hollow expression of my own face that is reflected in the shard of bronze I look in every morning; it has been a long time since he laughed, too. For awhile, the only sound is that of the leaves crackling and crunching beneath our feet as we walk. Agamemnon stays close by me; I note how quietly he walks. He has the air of one accustomed to being in the woods.

We have walked almost a mile from the house when we reach the lake.

I have seen more attractive places. My lake is not like the Eurotas River, which flows almost in my backyard, clean and perfect and shining in the sunlight, or the harbor where the trade ships come in.

The lake's water is murky and the beach is dirt. The bottom of the lake is rocky and a thick layer of silt covers everything. But it belongs to me. The fish that play in the water are friendly; they nibble my finger and actually swim up to greet me when I whistle. The frogs and cicadas serenade me while I swim alone at night; the moon peeks through a little hole in the trees, kissing my skin through the water.

"This is it," I told him, brushing back the low-hanging branch of a tree threatening to obscure our view. I fold my arms across my chest, awaiting his reaction, half expecting the place so dear to my heart to be received with scorn. But instead, his eyes grow wide with admiration as he ducks under the branch I am holding back, makes his way to the water's edge.

"A _lake?" _he gasps, a broad grin spreading across his face. He shakes his head in wonderment. "You are _so _lucky!" I have considered myself a lot of things, but "lucky" is never on the list.

"I found it on one of my walks," I tell him. "This place is what keeps me from going insane."

"It's beautiful," says Agamemnon and I like the reverence in his tone. "Mycenae is landlocked." I cannot imagine what I would do, in a town with no woods and no water. He stares at the rippling water with longing. "Can you swim in it?"

I narrow my eyes in answer to his stupid question; he grins, shrugs, and starts taking off his clothes. I whip my short dress over my head, drape it over a tree-branch, and head for the water, only to find him behind me, frozen in shock.

"What?" I demand, screwing up my face. He hesitates, opening and closing his mouth like one of the fish when they bob up to the surface to beg bread crumbs from me. _"What?" _I say again in a tone that bears too much resemblance to my father's.

It is with obvious discomfort that he says at length, "I never saw a girl without her clothes on before."

I throw back my head and laugh as I spin, to let him see every part of me. In Sparta, children play naked together from the time they're old enough to walk. I tell him so and can only laugh harder when his jaw falls a little farther than before. He shudders when he touches the water with his big toe but I don't tease him. Plunging straight through to the deep end, while he huddles at the edge of the beach, is mockery enough.

"Isn't it cold?" he calls after me.

My father taught me to swim the year I was four, when we were at our hunting lodge in the mountains. He took me down to the river and threw me in. I wouldn't have minded, but it was iced over at the time. I swirl my hand around a few times in the lake, pretending to check the temperature.

I'm lying when I yell back, "Too warm, if anything!" but embarrassing him is worth it. A few minutes pass. I find my favorite rock, the one that juts out of the water, and take a flying leap off of it into the water. When I surface, I immediately get a splash of water in the face. I cough and spit and blink the water from my eyes, to find Agamemnon floating almost on top of me, hand poised to splash again. I draw my back my hand and throw a tidal wave at him, almost submerging him, and the war begins.

It is dark when we climb out, dripping wet, and laughing so hard our sides are aching. "That," said Agamemnon, between gasping giggles, "was the best day of my life."

I twist my hair in my hands, wringing it out like a sponge. I squeeze the water in his direction; he swats them back and makes a face at me. I jerk my clothes, which have been almost baked by the heat, from the branch and pause long enough to make eye contact as I whisper, "Mine too."

It occurs to me then that our fathers may have long since finished discussing whatever they were talking about; in mere minutes, my new friend might be whisked away from me, and gods know when—or if!—I'll ever see him again.

I shouldn't care. I tell myself that over and over as I tug my dress over my head. It is a case of mind over matter; if I tell myself enough times that I should not feel this way, eventually, I won't. My father runs an entire city-state by this practice. It works for everybody. Except me.

I haven't played like this with someone before. I'm involved in every sport Sparta has to offer, and I guess I enjoy it, but those games are treated like a fight to the death. Today I had _fun. _And that's a pretty rare thing for me. I don't want that to be gone! The thought that he might be gone, without hope of return, sets my heart pounding; I can't see straight. Without saying a word to Agamemnon, without grabbing my shoes, I take off in a dead run through the woods. I don't know how to handle goodbyes. So I don't.

I leave him at the edge of the lake, shouting my name into the darkness. But I don't answer. And I don't look back.

He finds me, almost an hour later, in the storerooms, curled up on a pile of fleeces, wearing only my coarse linen nightshift. The air is thick with the smells of drying meat and onions and the shaft of torchlight thrust in by the open door does not quite provide enough light to see me. I can't believe he's managed to find me; nobody ever checks the store-rooms.

"There you are," he murmured, a hint of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

I jerk up, flicking my hair out of my eyes. I had not considered the possibility of him still being here, had not planned what to say if I saw him again. But the words blurt out, without preparation. "I thought you'd left!"

He kicks the door shut with his foot and gropes across the room toward me. My stack of fleeces is almost six feet off the ground; I offer a hand to pull him up. "No," he grins, "that would be you. _I'm _staying in Sparta till the summer."

I almost fall backwards. _"You are?"_

"My father was going to take me with him to stay in his camp but when he saw how much fun I'd been having and your father offered to let me stay here…" Agamemnon grins. "I'm not going anywhere."

That offer of my father's was not a generous one made purely out of goodness of heart; Tyndareus has never done anything that was not sure to, in some way, benefit him. No doubt he envisions Agamemnon as the next High King of Mycenae—and future husband of his favorite daughter.

With all my father has done for Atreus thus far, he will have little choice but to give Agamemnon to Helen. But Agamemnon is oblivious to my father's intentions, and I will not be the one to tell him.

I let out the breath I didn't know I'd been holding and drop back onto the fleeces, stretching out length-wise across them. I felt suddenly sleepy, and realized that I had not felt at peace enough to be tired until he came back.

I wanted to hug him, tackle him off the fleeces in my excitement, but was afraid he wouldn't like it. So instead, I pitifully touched his arm and murmured, "I'm glad."

He lays down beside me and actually takes my hand. "Me too," he whispers, turning so I can see the moisture glimmering in his deep-set brown eyes. "I didn't want to go back with him."

"I didn't want you to," I mutter. The fleeces are comfortable and he's staying all summer. His departure is far enough away to not concern me. I am a yawn away from falling into dream-sleep.

"No," Agamemnon insists, giving me a little shake, "really! I don't want to be with him right now." He hesitates a moment before putting the words out into open air. "Not so soon after. Right now he…frightens me."

I think of my own father's face on the day of my mother's funeral, hard and gray as a stone, as he dug his fingernails into his palms, steeling himself against shedding a tear in Leda's memory. I had tried long and hard for his approval; Tyndareus made it clear that I would have better luck capturing the stars.

Now, he was just a remote figure who could have passed me in the halls and not known me as his daughter, a man to be reviled and feared, but never loved, no matter the depth of my longing. "Mine scares me too," I confess. The words are out before I can stop them and I hold my breath for just a moment, waiting for him to pounce on my weakness. But he doesn't.

"I don't ever want to be like him, Klytie," he whispers.

It felt so good to hear someone give voice to my secret longing that I let out a huge breath and squeezed his hand tight. "Me either!"

"Help me," Agamemnon says. "Make me a promise. Don't ever let me turn into my father!"

"How am I supposed to do that?" I ask, turning over to look him in the eyes. "Ten years from now, you'll be High King of Mycenae! You won't even remember me."

"I will!" he exclaims, dead serious. A moment passes and a smile creeps into his voice. "Where will you be in ten years?"

_Auctioned off to the highest bidding suitor like a calf for the slaughter. _I think the words but don't dare give voice to them. Men will come from all over Achaea for Helen, while I will be lucky to catch even the insignificant younger son of a king, whose only inheritance is a cottage somewhere in the mountains.

I have heard of royal estates that were scarcely more than farms, where the king and queen work alongside their farmhands. That, most likely, is my fate, though I have never dared broach the subject to Tyndareus for fear the reality will be far worse than my imaginings. But I give him a laugh that is as fake as it is cocky, and say, "Queen of the World!"

Agamemnon grins. "Of course. What else could you be?" My lungs constrict and for just a moment, I want so badly to tell him the truth—that I know my future and I'm scared as Hades. Just when I've worked up the nerve to tell him, he asks huskily, "Would you settle for Queen of Mycenae?"

My sister Helen has had numerous offers from boys, everything from promises to conquer cities and name them after her, or pleas for the honor of walking her home. The boys in town consider me so much one of them that I doubt they've even noticed I'm female.

Agamemnon's question takes me aback; I cannot think of a serious reply. I wonder what Helen would do in response, and then angrily banish the thought from my mind, wondering why in Hades it should matter. So I lean toward him and flutter my lashes. "Is that a marriage proposal?"

He cocks his eyebrow, playing along. "Do you want it to be?"

What I want matters as little as it always has. My opinion would not even change the dinner menu, let alone my destiny. I suppose I accepted this a long time ago. But Agamemnon is a fugitive. He has no kingdom, no hope, and no family surrounding him.

And his confidence seems to be unscathed; he is as convinced of his future as High King of Mycenae as he was when he was at home in his palace. What would it be like, I wondered, to believe like that? I cannot even imagine, so I fake it, laughing long and loud and free. "You've known me for a day!"

"That's long enough to know I like your company," he returns, serious again. I have to second that.

"Ask me at the end of the summer," I said, grinning. Yes. That's a good answer. Right now, he just thinks I'm flirting, but pretty soon, he'll give up and decide it's too far away. He won't like me enough to wait. And that's for the best.

I have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish, given the perfect reply—and yet I feel strangely empty. Regardless of my predetermined fate, I do not _want _to be married. Not ever, not to anyone. I don't even want to think about carrying children in my body. But I liked the idea of a boy liking me.

Granted, he has offered blindly, without considering the gravity of his words—that he might be stuck with me for the rest of his life, that at some point he might decide he doesn't like me—but I like that he offered at all. And I would have liked to have the choice to accept. But I can't bring myself to say any of this, so instead, I say, "I'm glad you're here."

"Me too," he replies.

We vowed to stay up all night talking, but fell asleep within the first ten minutes. That's how they found us, late the next morning, curled up together on the fleeces. When he heard, my father's eyes were like granite. Such things were frowned upon in Sparta, and though he was finally convinced that nothing inappropriate had gone on in the storeroom, there was still the matter of punishment and it was reserved for me alone.

Autumn passed in a golden haze of falling leaves and laughter. As fall began to merge into winter, my father threw a party for his most intimate friends, with activities for the children as well. A dozen or so came, naturally all the children in town I hated with a passion.

These were Helen's and my brother's friends, some of whom had gone to school with me since we were four, and had never spoken a word to me in six years. On the track, and in the wrestling pit, I was the undisputed queen, but my athletic prowess had nothing to gain me friendships.

Helen had fluttered her lashes and shed a few tears from her sapphire eyes and gotten Tyndareus to excuse her from all sports. He gave a long-winded speech to the man in charge of the girls' sports teams, about how Helen was "too delicate for such rough-housing." The coach didn't believe a word of it, but what could he do? By this point, everyone in town knew Helen always got her way.

She kept showing up to practices, though, and for a long time, I couldn't understand why. Then I realized it was because she liked watching naked boys. They liked watching her, too. She came to practices decked out in her best clothes and jewels, wearing so much perfume you could smell her long before you saw her. The coaches had whipped several boys already for ogling Helen when they should have been running.

I had thought the boys' infatuation, or the competition going among the girls to see who would be Helen's best friend this week, might cause them to turn to me in hopes of getting a good word in with my sister, but I can't even get somebody to _pretend _to be my friend. It was on nights like this that I was very grateful for Agamemnon.

A cart was piled with bales of hay, two fast ponies hitched to it, and the children climbed up; we rode through the dark countryside, laughing and singing. It happened every year. On the nights of most parties, I managed to be conveniently "sick," so I wouldn't have to go on the hay ride and watch everybody else cluster together, leaving me on my lone bale of hay, like a leper. Nobody—including my father—ever noticed I was gone.

But tonight, Agamemnon sat with me, the two of us against the world. We shared jokes only the two of us knew, and I laughed till my sides ached. Our breath came out blue as the temperatures plunged, little puffs of air hovering over us. We had a contest to see how big the puffs could be, how far out they could extend. And more than once, I caught the other girls staring at me in envy.

I stopped caring what other people thought of me. I had grown dependant on Agamemnon's friendship. We knew each other's secrets; he was as comfortable in my head as he was in his own. Between us, we had drowned out our realities.

I had almost succeeded in forgetting that forever was not an option—not for his stay in Sparta, not for our friendship—when I woke up to find that winter had vanished and tiny pink blossoms were beginning to bud on the bushes. Songbirds winged their way through the trees and the evening frost melted at the first kiss of dawn. Summer was upon us. We refused to speak of it, clinging with childish faith to the hope that if we didn't talk about it, maybe it would go away.

They came without warning, early in the morning. Atreus' emissaries, announcing that Mycenae had been recaptured and he wanted his sons home, where they belonged. Those were the words that sent me over the edge, running past Agamemnon and up to my room, fist stuffed in my mouth to stifle my sobs. He _belonged _with me! But I couldn't say that, could not even put up a fight, and I hated myself for the hot tears that squeezed through my closed lids and clumped in my lashes.

I had known, in the back of my mind, this day was coming. I planned on a cool dismissal, a handshake. I planned on being strong. It had taken all of a minute for my resolutions to crumble. I couldn't stand for Agamemnon to see me like that, didn't even want to think about the teary goodbye I would give him now, the one that would end with me clinging to him, begging him not to leave me alone here.

Agamemnon had gone ash-white. He stood frozen on the portico, unable even to reach out for me as I flew past him. In some dark corner of my numb brain, I understood that my flight was, to some degree, worse than the emotional parting I dreaded. What if he didn't understand? But I had never possessed the power to make things right with my words. Anything I said would just mess it up. I pounded up the stairs, slammed my bedroom door, and let the tears seep into my pillow.


	3. Chapter 3

**Five Years Later**

He towers over me, six feet of solid muscle. Eyes the color of sewage bore into mine, slamming home a single message: _he means to take me down. _I throw the challenge right back at him. He clenches his fists and raises them high above his head in a salute to the cheering crowd.

He probably doesn't know that only the people in town who like to be difficult betted on him tonight. My reputation for winning every wrestling match I've ever entered was enough to ensure that ninety-five percent of all the bets placed tonight were in my favor.

I don't bother to wave to the crowd. I don't wrestle for the people who cheer for me in the stands every weekend, and pretend not to know my name the rest of the time. Saving the rage for the moment the bell clangs in the wrestling pit is the only thing that keeps me from going on a mass killing spree, where I murder all those who've hurt me, then myself. And that is why I always win.

The boy's face changes several times in the minute he stays in the ring. I see the face of my father, who never loved me, my mother who tortured and humiliated me, my sister, whose every breath is a slap in my face. And then I'm on top of him, pummeling him again and again with my fists, growling with all the fury of a wild animal. _"Get her off me!" _he screams for all Sparta to hear. _"She's crazy! I surrender!"_

I straighten and extend a hand to help him up, which he knocks away. "Good game," I say sweetly. His finger swirls around a few times in the air near his head and his eyes tell me—as if that wasn't enough—he plainly thinks I'm mad.

The crowd erupts into wild applause as I haul myself out of the wrestling pit. I act like I don't even hear them as I stalk across the field toward the stands to get my clothes.

Children jump down from the stands and chase each other around, imitating me.

"Did you see her?"

"She went—_BAM—!"_

"She had him out in a minute!"

"No one's ever stayed in longer than a minute!"

"When I grow up, I want to fight just like Klytie!"

I pause to wink at them before tugging my thigh-high dress over my head. The children practically swoon. As I swagger across the field to the water fountain, amidst applause and an endless sonnet of praise from every child in Sparta, I decide that that part, at least, I could get used to.

Kastor, my big brother, catches me at the water fountain, coming up behind me and dunking my head under the stream without warning. I twist out of his grasp with a cry of surprise and leap into his arms like a flying squirrel, locking my legs around his hips and throwing my hands in the air as he twirls me around. "Kly-tie! Kly-tie! Kly-tie!" he crows, in time to the yells of the still-cheering crowd.

He swings me until I'm seeing double, then sets me on my shaky feet. "All those days of pummeling me on the living room floor paid off, huh?" he teases, pulling my sweaty pony-tail.

Kastor is twenty and married now; when he was my age, he was the best wrestler in Sparta. "I learned from the best," I say, grinning.

Kastor wraps a strand of his black hair around his face and holds it under his nose like a mustache. I giggle. "But these boys don't let you win like I did," he says thoughtfully. "There must be some talent in there somewhere."

"_Let _me win?" I gasp. _"I beat you!"_

"Like Hades you did!" he says, whooping. Kastor snatches my trophy from the judge's booth and holds it high above his head. "I just might keep this," he says, grinning wickedly.

I make a mad grab for the trophy. _"Kastor!"_

He whisks it just out of reach, laughing. "Consider it my personal reward for training Sparta's best wrestler. You owe all your success to me anyhow," he adds, lunging in long enough to pinch my cheek, jerking the trophy away before I can catch it.

Polydeuces, Kastor's twin, appears out of nowhere just then, slinging an arm around my shoulders and re-claiming the trophy from Kastor. "You know, I used to play sports to get trophies before I realized you can just have them made anywhere?" He fingers the markings on the base of the trophy, traces the large _ONE-HUNDRED _carved into it, and whistles. "Now I'm good at everything."

I throw back my head and laugh. Polydeuces claps me on the back. "A hundred matches in a row," he says proudly. "Getting on up there, Klytie!"

"It's a start," I agree, because what might be huge to some families is a simple expectation in mine.

My father won't make a big fuss over my victory, but if I lost, I would feel his displeasure likely for the rest of my life.

It happens to me every game.

With every rush of victory comes the moment when my heart drops to my feet, when my father's expectations dig their claws into my skull and a million butterflies run around in my stomach, turning flips and bumping into each other.

I have something close to my father's approval—so long as I stay on top. But what if the luck that brought my winning streak ran out? What if one day, I decided I didn't want to play sports anymore? What will I be then? I win to keep my insecurities at bay, because when there is only the games and and the spotlight, I lose myself for a little while. But it's a vicious cycle. With every win comes the doubt, and the instant need for the high of success. I realize suddenly that I will never stop winning. My very life depends on it.

I throw one arm around the neck of each twin, pulling them with me as I head out of the arena. "Are you coming to my party?" I ask, searching for something, anything, to take my mind off of Tyndareus. The girls' wrestling team—along with my sister Helen's posse of oversexed dress mannequins—was hosting a party tonight—as if my win can be theirs by association.

Polydeuces gasps. "You have to ask? Haven't we been to every victory party you've ever had your whole life?"

Kastor adds softly, "Just not this one."

I stop in the middle of the street, removing my arms from their shoulders. "How come?"

Kastor throws me a henpecked look. "Phoebe's started to complain, Kay."

At the mention of Kastor's wife, I blow out my breath in a huff that rearranges the strands of my hair, plastered to my forehead by sweat. "Who cares what Phoebe thinks?" I demand.

Kastor chuckles. _"I_ do, since I have to live with her! And I have been away a lot lately… It doesn't look good for me to leave her alone to go spend time with another woman."

"I'm your _sister!" _

Kastor heaves a sigh. "I know that, and you know that, but Phoebe's always thought there was something more between us. The gods themselves couldn't convince her otherwise.

I had best make haste and please her or she'll starve me for a month." His black eyes narrow. _"All _the way around."

"Gods forbid," grins Polydeuces, who brings a different woman to bed every night. "Why in Hades did you ever get married?"

A wispy half-smile flits across Kastor's face and his eyes take on an odd glow. "Because I fell in love," he says easily.

"Falling in love is like falling in a hole!" I snap. "I don't ever mean to do it."

Polydeuces grabs my fist and pumps it in the air. "Good for you!" my brother crows. "You could have taken a lesson from our baby sister, eh Kastor? Before you went and caught yourself in the snare of matrimony?"

Kastor rolls his eyes and tosses his lion's mane of ebony hair. "I guess I have to leave you here," he grins, "and return to my snare."

"Good luck ever coming back," Polydeuces snickers, "once Phoebe finds out you went to Klytie's game first thing when you got home, instead of coming to her."

"I really hate that woman, Kastor," I say.

"You hate everybody," he says back. "And I can't wait for you to get married! Your ears will _never _stop burning when I start talking all the times you said you would _never _fall in love!"

He hugs us both and offers one last snicker before loping off into the darkness, toward his horse and chariot. Polydeuces links arms with me and swinging our hands high, laughing like madmen, we skip toward the crowd gathered at the gates of the arena. "Look who I brought!" The crowd surges toward me, cheering my name, and before I know it, I'm being carried on the shoulders of my laughing, jostling friends, toward the party.

Behind me, somebody starts the team cheer and I wave my trophy in the air, pumping my fist and singing along, all the while wondering how there can be so much joy all around me and I still have a hole inside.

Five minutes into it, I slunk away from my own party. Tomorrow, nobody will notice or ask why I wasn't there. No one except my father, who had a strange way of ferreting out all my mistakes. _He _expected me to be at those parties; if I came home early, there would be hell to pay and no excuse would be enough to get me out of it.

If my claim was that my innards were spilling out onto the floor, Tyndareus would demand that I stitch myself up, smile wide, and pretend like I was having fun. I swear he makes me go just because he knows I hate it.

I wandered around in the woods for awhile, trying to get lost and failing; I had grown up hiking these forests. I dipped my toes in the river, splashing the creatures I found within, and puzzling over the question of whether it was possible to drown a fish. I made a trap out of reeds and dragged it through the water, to see if I could catch anything. I didn't. "Even the fish don't like me," I said aloud.

I make a mental note to tell Agamemnon that when I write him back tonight. That's what I'd rather do—write Agamemnon.

He, unlike my supposed friends, enjoys my company. He writes me every day now; we've kept up the correspondence since he left, with the goal that it should feel like he's right here with me. I'll never tell him, but it doesn't. I can't shove him into my lake, or show the things I want him to see.

I tried describing them in my letters, but I'm a poor writer, and description is _not _my strong suit. So we talk about funny things, to hide the pain.

I left the river just as the party crowd was getting out. I let out a sigh of relief as I loped up the dirt path through the woods to my back door. Rather than going straight to my room (my preference), I make the standard appearance for my father, purposefully slamming the door too loud and yelling, "Tyndareus, I'm home!" when I know he hates slamming, yelling, and being called by his first name.

He is a silhouette in the vestibule, but even his shadow wears the tight fake smile my father reserves only for me.

"Klytemnestra," he says in an icy whisper, retaliation at its finest. "How was the party?"

Tyndareus and I have a lying game. He pretends to care about me and I pretend to play along. This is the extent of our relationship. "Fun!" I chirp, my usual lie.

"That's nice," he returns, losing interest already.

"Night," I mutter on my way up the stairs.

"_Goodnight,"_ he enunciates in reply.

Funny how, every night after a win, alone in my own bed in the darkness, I never feel like a winner. I count my trophies on their shelf, replay the game in my head…and I always come up empty. And if the emptiness was _only _that, I bet I could handle it.

Nobody told me it hurt to be lonely. Or the knowledge that you were unwanted could braid your organs into knots and make you want to throw up till there was nothing left inside you. Maybe then, you could erase yourself and become something people wanted. I had endured every night for five years; tonight, I was sick unto death of it, desperate to ward it off.

So I stall, hoping to get so tired I can drag myself to bed and fall asleep the minute my head hits the pillow. No such luck. Endurance training has banished the possibility of sleep induced by exhaustion. After an evening of wrestling, I could stay awake tonight and tomorrow night, too, and—as only my luck would have it—sleepiness wouldn't set in till the middle of my next practice.

I don't know what I'm trying to accomplish when I shoo my servants out the door and take an eternity folding and putting away my own clothes. I draw a bath instead of swiping my feet with a moist cloth and give my hair a hundred strokes with my hairbrush, the way Helen does every night. She says it makes hers glossy and full.

I've never given my hair a hundred strokes in my fifteen years; most days, it doesn't even see a brush. It'll probably be traumatized from contact with one, and fall out tomorrow at the worst possible time, leaving me bald in front of Helen and her friends.

But then I run out of things to do and the last candle is extinguished. I am alone with my bed, and my thoughts, and the pain. The minutes drag; I play with the numbers in my head, figuring up how many minutes is left until sunrise when I can get up and end this madness.

But the time taken up in solving that riddle has not rid me of near enough of them. I shift positions, flip my pillow. Nothing induces sleep. I give up trying and cross to the window, slinging my legs over the edge to dangle feely in the sweltering air. I swing them back and forth for a breeze, but I get as much of a result with that as I did with trying to sleep.

My eyes dart to the ground below me, considering the drop from my third floor window.

I should have it calculated well enough; didn't I write down a formula once? Whether or not I would die on impact, and if it would be worth the risk of injury? I smile to myself. If I were injured a way that ruined my worth as a bargaining chip for alliance through marriage, or that ended my athletic career, Tyndareus would go ahead and kill me. I would have no worth left and love certainly would not be enough to stay the hand that held the knife. Love did not factor into Tyndareus' feelings for me.

My father had reminded me often that he had wanted only Helen and the boys; another daughter was unnecessary. Babies whose eyes didn't focus, or who didn't weigh enough, were exposed immediately, according to law; those who would not enrich the glory of Sparta were worthless. But a daughter who could bear strong children for Sparta or be married off in exchange for a peace treaty was a valuable commodity. The people would protest. That, not paternal feeling, was what kept Tyndareus from exposing me at birth.

I eye the ground again. What if I did it? I had considered it so long it was almost embarrassing to still be waiting for the drop. What would it feel like, to die that way? Would it be quick and painless, over in one fatal moment? Or would I lie in agony on the ground for hours, achingly aware of broken bones as I bled out slowly? I was not afraid of pain, but I didn't look forward to dying that way.

My gaze turns inward, and I blink in the shadowy darkness of my room, till my eyes adjust and I find my knife. Helen has one also (not that she could use it) and though she doesn't know it, hers is fit only for peeling potatoes in a kitchen. Mine is real, a great hacking instrument of death—and I know how to use it.

Could I drive the point home with force enough to end my life? I think of the closeness of a knife, the reason I had always thought it a good weapon for revenge. You could look right in your victim's eyes and watch the life go out of them. If you hated the man enough, you could savor that look forever. But if it was my own? I might have to close my eyes. I did not want to watch myself bleed out, did not want to remember the last look in my eyes, or the dying gasp that would flee my lips.

I might miss, drive it only halfway into my heart, and be forced to finish myself off. Or what if I missed my heart entirely, and sliced off a breast? Helen had gotten hers so early, and it taken me so long to catch up… They got in my way when I was wrestling, but I was immensely fond of them. I did not relish the thought of walking around one-breasted all my life! _Then _see if any man would marry me!

I buried my head in my folded arms, and gave way to the hot tears that squeezed through my eyelids. That's when I heard it—the voice, loud and insistent, that seemed to come from all around me. _"Klytie!"_

"Go away!" I snapped back, without considering the logic of hearing voices and talking back to them.

What if I went mad? We had never had any mad in Sparta; I imagined that was because they weren't _allowed._ If I started hearing things, Tyndareus would murder me for sure!

But the voice persisted. _"Klytemnestra Eilethyia Tyndariad, get down here!"_ That sounded enough like my father to make me sick to my stomach.

Hades, if I had to have voices in my head, did they have to be _his? _I am not sure what made me look down again, only that once I did, I could not tear my eyes away. The figure on the darkened lawn was achingly familiar. _"Agamemnon?"_

In the moments between our embrace on the lawn, and the whispered conspiracy as I smuggled him up the back stairs to my bedroom, I had not noticed he was covered in blood. It is only now that I _see_ him, huddled against my pillows, eyes dilated in the torchlight.

Tendrils of black hair escape the confines of the ponytail he had crammed it into, and there are lines carved into his face that make him appear far older than fifteen. He is, I realize, what I had always imagined we would look like if our hearts were reflected on our faces.

I fetch a basin of water from the adjoining bathroom and clean the mixture of dust and gore from his body before attacking him with my questions. He strips easily, stretching to accommodate my cloth, and his eyes relax into a light close. "Thank you."

"Not a problem," I return. I have to confine myself to that, because if I let myself say anything more, the growing barrage of questions I am keeping suppressed will fly out all at once.

I get him a clean nightshift of mine—which, to my humiliation, fits him perfectly—and some water. He doesn't hesitate to help himself to my bed, and rearranges my covers to his preference.

It is not until he has fluffed the pillows, and tucked the bedclothes up to his chin, that he cocks an eyebrow and remarks, "You must be wondering why I'm here."

I want to laugh, because it strikes me as ironic, but the gravity of the situation weighs heavy on me, gripping me with the nameless dread that clutched my heart the day my mother died.

Agamemnon is looking up at me with questioning eyes; I try to find something funny to say. "That's fine," I drawl, sliding into bed beside him. "You can drag it out another hour or two. I'm not curious at all." I am too anxious to carry it off. My joke falls flat and vanishes into the night air, ashamed of my incompetence and trying to make up for being forced into existence.

Agamemnon seems not to have noticed. He looks beyond me, seeing into a world of unspeakable horrors that I cannot follow him into, not even to draw him out. "He's got it," he says at length.

I run the words through my head, wondering if there is something between us that should be of immediate significance to me. I come up with nothing and finally have to ask, "Who got what?"

"Thyestes," he says through clenched teeth. "Mycenae."

I sit bolt upright. "But your father…!"

"Is dead," Agamemnon finishes for me. "My brother…" He utters a mirthless laugh as he flings himself back against the pillows, raking his fingers through his hair. "Forgive me," he murmurs. "I haven't even had time to process this myself. I…" He leans back and closes his eyes; moon-glow highlights a silver droplet snaking down his cheek.

I reach for his hand. "Agamemnon…" The tears come harder and faster then, defying his efforts to hold them back, until he loses control and buries his face in my shoulder. Sobs rack his body; he quivers in my arms like a frightened little boy. I don't tell him it will be all right.

I don't lie to myself in times like these, and cannot bring myself to do it to him. All I can do is be here for him, and let him cry it out.

Agamemnon and I share a bond that doesn't require words; we're the same, he and I. Only before each other have we ever dared to cry. He does not need empty promises; I can feel his appreciation for my silence as his ragged breathing slows and grows even with mine. Eventually, he pulls away, dabbing at his eyes with the corner of his robe. He opens and closes his mouth; piecing together the fragmented details I can make out, I venture, "Menelaus killed your father?"

Agamemnon shakes his head wildly. "Not Menelaus."

"But you don't have another brother—!"

His smile is bitter. "I thought I did. Now I don't."

The story pours out then, about his half-brother Aegisthus—a mere child of seven—born to his father's second wife, who was just four years older than Agamemnon.

Aegisthus had become Atreus' favorite and he kept the child and his mother with him when he sent Agamemnon and Menelaus to Sparta. He had never mentioned that to me in all the time I'd known him; I had never realized that being sent away was the emotional equivalent of a slap in the face, Atreus' way of his telling his firstborn sons how little they meant to him. There had even been rumors of Atreus' plans to reject Agamemnon as his heir in favor of Aegisthus.

"That's absurd!" I blurted, cutting him off. "What's so special about him, anyway?"

"Your guess is as good as mine," Agamemnon mutters. Before I can reply, he jerks up, eyes flashing with fire. "I'll tell you what it is! He's manipulative, that's what! He blames everything on me!"

The spark drains from his eyes, and the intensity fades; he knots his fingers in my bedspread. "I'm eight years older than that child. Atreus _knows _me."

His eyes lock with mine just then; I read the pain within them. "Why wouldn't he believe _me?_"

He tells me the rest then, as he remembers it, in broken bits and pieces that I am left to connect on my own. Atreus found out where Thyestes was hiding, and was preparing an army to capture it. Agamemnon lead it, bringing Thyestes to his father in chains, only to be completely ignored when little Aegisthus, strutting and brandishing the sword his mother had given him for his birthday, offered to finish the traitor off.

I murmur my loyalty to my friend, punctuating his tale with_ "Un-be-lieve-able!" _and _"Who in Hades does he think he is?" _Agamemnon does not acknowledge my encouragement, but I read the steely determination that grows in his eyes with my every word. He would not have strength to finish without me.

The look on Atreus' face had gone straight to his heart; Aegisthus' offer clearly meant more to him than Agamemnon's success and it cut him like a knife. "I thought that was my chance," Agamemnon sighs. "To really show him up, you know? Prove once and for all to Atreus who the next king of Mycenae should be!"

It was all lost, now. Through some twisted turn of events that I was not quite clear on, Thyestes had revealed _himself_ as Aegisthus' father, citing the child's sword as one belonging to him, that he had given to Pelopia on the night Aegisthus was conceived.

How Aegisthus ended up killing _Atreus _and freeing Thyestes from prison was even more unclear, but it was a plausible enough explanation for why my friend had fled his home in the middle of the night. "Thyestes will kill me," Agamemnon breathes. "He's hunted me down like a rabid dog!" His head drops limply against the pillow. "I've killed six of his trackers already, Klytemnestra!"

"You're safe now," I tell him, squeezing his hand. I can say nothing else with certainty, but I do at least have this. "He wouldn't dare touch you here."

Agamemnon gnaws his lip, considering, and seems to have calmed down, only to flare to life seconds later when the fire of a new thought blazes through his mind. "It's still all right for Aegisthus," he snarls. "If his father's Atreus, he gets the throne. If his father's Thyestes… he still gets it!" He pounds his fist on my bed with every word.

"_He still comes out on top!_ And here I am…orphaned, disinherited, running for my life…!"

"Among friends," I finish. He looks up at me with moist eyes, as though seeing me for the first time. "You've still got me."

He nods, and for the first time since his arrival, I catch a glimmer of a real smile. "I still have you," he repeats, more to himself than to me. He squeezes my hand. "Promise me, Klytemnestra! No matter what happens…no matter where we end up, or who we become… Swear on your life you'll always be mine."

"Always," I promised, hand over my heart. I didn't even have to think about it.


	4. Chapter 4

The summer dragged on, and though we tried, Agamemnon and I couldn't quite get back what we'd had as children. We clung to each other like an addict to his drug, and occasionally managed a joke, but Agamemnon was a different person now. And I underestimated how a change in him could affect me. Seeing him broken was enough to make my own heart crumble, and in comforting him, I adopted his burdens, until I no longer remembered that I had not truly lived the horror alongside him.

As was our tradition, we tried to fight the pain with cold refusal to acknowledge it, but terror crept in with the darkness. Dreams, thick and wet with blood, woke him in the middle of the night with screams in his ears and the smell of rotting flesh in his nostrils. And though my father had forbidden it, somehow I always found my way into his bed.

We sensed each other's pain long before we heard the screaming, padding through the torch-lit hallway, slipping it into the other's bed to hold them as they tossed in terror, to make sure ours was the first face they saw when they came back to reality, broken.

It was my turn soothing his nightmare. Summer was fighting a losing battle to keep from turning into fall. The air swung between crisp and sticky, alternating with every rustle of a breeze that whispered through the trees, not yet a vibrant autumn gold, but the color of unripe bananas.

He was pressed so tight against me you could not fit a knife blade between us, his arms wrapped around my waist. He suddenly raised his eyes to mine and his look was deep, _hungry. _Agamemnon had never looked at me that way before. I did not know how to blow it off. He drinks me in for a silent moment, dark eyes stealing over the length of my body, before chuckling and saying, not quite under his breath, "I think it just now occurred to me that you're female."

His hand reaches out, tentatively, to touch my breasts, bulging through my nightgown. He must have felt them a hundred times before in our embraces, or jabbed them when we wrestled, but never had I been touched so deliberately. His fingers spread out, cupping my tit in his hand with a gossamer touch, then slowly moving as he stroked it. I burned with a fever that began at my cheeks and crept downward to consume me, as I became aware of the moisture bubbling between my thighs.

What happened next was like the steps of a dance, so right it felt like I had been born knowing how to do it. Animal instinct pulled my hands down; I knew to touch him there as my lips found his. He might have touched me first, but I initiated the kiss. Our lips fit together like a lock to a key; the kiss was hot and sticky and tasted like summer air and the mint and honey spread I put on my lips when they chapped. His hands moved to my lower back as mine drifted up to the base of his neck. My fingers crept through the forest of his hair, fingering the ragged edges where the barber had not cut properly.

I felt like one in a dream, as though I was watching another girl with my face go through motions I had never attempted. But the feelings that crashed over me, bearing me aloft to Elysium, were wholly mine. And through it all, I could think of only one thing.

_I was kissing my best friend. And I liked it. _

I woke late in the morning, in an empty bed, numb and conscious of two things only. I kissed my best friend last night. I did more than kiss him. I also realize—somewhat later—that I have overslept. I stagger through the motions of bathing and dressing like one undead, blearily grasping the fact that my father will kill me, and—because Tyndareus has a way of knowing everything—will have an axe ready to fall from the ceiling when I sit down at the breakfast table.

What I will say to Agamemnon when I see him again has not even made my priority list. But when I get downstairs, no axe awaits. There is only Helen's smirk, and my father's cocked eyebrow. "Glad you could join us." Polydeuces, the one most often late to breakfast, (the one who can get away with it!) gives me a wink that says he expects full details later on.

I sneak a glance at Agamemnon out of the corner of my eye, but he makes a point of not meeting my gaze. The knot in my stomach tightens. I choke down a few morsels for the sake of appearance— Tyndareus is just _waiting _for me to incriminate myself, I can feel it!—but I don't really taste the food. It might have been the gods' ambrosia or shoe leather for all I noticed.

Agamemnon and I leave in two separate directions; I had planned to speak to him on the way out of the ding room, but he bolts from the table before I've even finished eating, and then I have no excuse to follow him. I linger at the table for just a moment, almost too numb to move.

Helen tosses her head as she rises, smoothing her dress, as if to make sure it is still pulled tight against her curves. "Coming?" I say nothing, but make sure I walk a good two feet in front of her.

Our formal education is long over, much to my sister's relief. She mastered letters and writes a beautiful hand but that's where her academic accomplishments end. She confuses geometry and geography and cares nothing for history. Our tutor shook his head and eventually gave up correcting her. I was the one who made top marks, who took home extra work in the summer, and stayed after class debating philosophy with my teacher.

"_You would have been a brilliant ruler, Klytemnestra," _he sighed, and I loved the compliment so much I forgave him for not calling me Klytie. Demosthenes mourned with me when my father pulled me out of school and began what he considered more important—training to become a wife.

Now, my days are spent sewing, weaving, dancing, cooking, and arranging flowers, in-between lectures on the duties of a wife from Melita, a fluttery little woman whose breasts and perfume are the first things you'd notice. Tyndareus said proudly that she was "accomplished." She has a husband and ten children. Aside from becoming a dour old broodmare, _what in Hades has she accomplished? _

The thought that I will one day be fit for nothing but breeding is too depressing for me to burden myself with just now. Every afternoon, I retreat into myself, letting my eyes and ears glaze over till I am nothing but a body in a chair. Bright sunlight peeks through the window, enticing me with the promise of its rays on my bare skin, the ice-water rivers, and exercise. _Come to me, Klytie! _the outdoors scream.

The sitting-room's window gives me a perfect view of the boys training for war and the younger girls going off to school. My legs grow so numb I cannot feel them, while my mind is set afire with longing for the strain of arithmetic and philosophy.

These classes are Helen's glory. She has a flair for decorating and might have been born dancing. She gives all the right answers when asked about how to handle marital situations. Mine mostly get notes sent to Tyndareus.

In addition to accepting infidelity as a matter of course, I will also be expected to stay out of my husband's way and never engage in conversations with the men. Involvement in politics is forbidden, and I can look forward to having no say whatsoever in the way my husband runs his city-state. From the looks of it, once I start breeding, the nursery will be as much for me as my babies, for all the time I'll be spending in it!

My husband will have innumerable concubines and bastards, but gods help me if I ever take a lover! It was on the second day of these classes that I decided to commit suicide the day my father found me a husband. 

Helen actually _enjoys_ the classes! Once, I ventured to ask her if it didn't disgust her to know that every detail of her life would be controlled by men. She looked at me blankly and responded that she was guaranteed jewels, parties, and a lover on the side if she was discreet; she wanted nothing else. I have since given up attempting conversation.

My opportunities to best Helen in anything are few; I have to pounce on them immediately. We are both disasters in the kitchen, but at least _I _didn't burn water! For all her enthusiasm, (and her perfection in every other area), Helen can't sew a straight stitch to save her life.

If Melita had a drachma for every time she ripped out Helen's snapped, snarled thread, she'd be richer than my father. I had imagined I would be the hopeless one, but even my poor efforts were better than hers! With shaming Helen as an incentive, the fingers that had previously only been fit for grabbing somebody in a headlock became stunningly nimble, forming tiny complicated stitches, and working the loom with dexterity.

I preened ridiculously where Helen could see—then, when the boys teased me about acting like a girl, pantomimed gagging and said the only reason I did it was to make Helen look stupid. Secretly, I was proud of my stitches; I liked knowing that I could make such beautiful things. And I found weaving to be relaxing. The teasing would be relentless if the boys I wrestled heard about it, so sometimes, after a long day, when everybody else had gone to sleep, I sat alone in my bedroom, weaving by candlelight.

In spite of it all, the fact remains that no matter how poor her sewing and cooking, Helen will be a decorative wife, who will bring beauty to her husband's halls. She will throw the most lavish parties in Sparta and glitter on her husband's arm. I, despite my talents, will only be practical. Forget passion, forget beauty—I can look forward only to a life of _duty. _My stomach twists as I think again about how much a foray into passion has cost me already.

_Oh, sunlight! I almost forgot your existence! _I throw up my hands and run headlong down the hill to the practice field. The uncut grass grows higher the farther down I go, tickling my feet and then my calves. We're learning swordplay today.

Technically, I don't need it, and I'm the only girl there, but I know the instructor. Damocles knows I spend six hours of every day stifling my urge to gag; out of pity, he lets me practice. The sunset training sessions used to be the highlight of my day—sports _and _Agamemnon, my two favorite things combined! Halfway down to the field, my bravado wavers. What will he say when he sees me? What if last night ruined everything?

Damocles acknowledges me with a nod when I arrive, and melt into the crowd of boys clustered around him. Agamemnon stands on the far side of the circle, as far away from me as anybody could get—but by chance or design?

Damocles gives a brief of speech on proper sword-fighting techniques; I roll my shoulders and toss my hair, working myself out of the ball of tension I become during Melita's sessions.

I close my eyes, breathing in sun and sky and air that somehow, always, tastes like everything I'm feeling. I am barely aware that Damocles has assigned us partners—and put me with Agamemnon. He heads toward me with his usual swagger…because he was forced, or because he wants to see me?

We have been together this whole summer, any time Damocles allowed us to have partners. Had Damocles not made the usual arrangements without consulting us, would Agamemnon have chosen someone else?

I am naked in the summer heat, like everybody else; I am the only girl in this group and boys have started to stare. The catcalls which used to bolster my confidence are now filtered out; I cannot bear to raise my eyes to Agamemnon's. Damocles gives the signal to begin and Agamemnon disarms me almost in seconds. "You're dead," he says, the first words he's spoken to me all day.

"Lucky stroke," I say back, fighting hard to keep my anxiety from showing.

A grin slices his dark face in half. "You're still dead." 

"Go to Hades," I mutter. "I'll beat you next time." But I don't. The next time, I end up flat on my back with his foot between my breasts. I can feel myself growing hot with a mixture of shame and arousal. I wonder if he can see it, too. I am intensely grateful for my olive skin; nobody can see my blush through it.

"Klytie!" Damocles barks. "You're losing your touch! Are they turning you into a woman?"

I shove Agamemnon off and stagger to my feet. "No, sir," I grunted. "I'm just a little off from being cooped up all day, that's all."

A sour grunt passes for acknowledgement. "Turning a wild thing like you into a housewife…" Damocles shakes his head. "Shame." I heartily agree with him. I drag through a miserable hour-long practice, in which I am consistently beaten, despite switching partners. By the end of the day, I want nothing more than to curl into myself and cry.

But _A lady never cries! _is on Melita's endless list of rules, and the first rule of all my instructors and Tyndareus; whether I am a fighter or a lady, tears are forbidden.

So I jerk my clothes back on, almost tearing them in the process, and kick everything in my path up the hill. I am wearing open-toed sandals.

Not only is my misery still pent up inside me, my toes are bruised. This entire day has gone to Hades in a hand-basket. What's worse is that I can't see it getting better—until Agamemnon materializes beside me, and says in a low voice, "Walk with me."

It is a command, not an offer, and something about it keeps me from replying with my usual shrug. We head off the path, unspeaking, not touching. Agamemnon and I used to share a comfortable silence; one of the things I loved most about us was our easy way of being together without having to ask ninety questions per minute.

I now found myself wondering if we would ever share that again. Gnawing my lower lip had turned to quick nips that left little punctured holes in my flesh. I had almost split it when Agamemnon said, "I want to talk about last night, Klytie."

The words tumble out the moment I unsink my teeth from my lip. "All right!" I curse myself for sounding so desperate.

Agamemnon stops in his tracks and finally raises his eyes to mine. "Klytie, I…" His words hang heavy in the air; both of us are caught by surprise when he blurts, "I don't regret it!"

"_Then why did you do that to me—" _I shriek. The look on his face stops me. I heard only _regret. _I run the words through my head, piecing together the one before it for the first time. "Oh," I said very softly. A smile hovers, uncertain, on his lips, as if waiting for my permission to jump out. I lock my hands behind my back so he can't see me wringing them as I look him in the eyes. "I don't either." He answers me by crushing his lips against mine, sucking against me so hard that the wounds on my lip burst and bleed, trickling into his mouth.

That was the day I learned a rule of grammar they didn't teach me in school. A kiss could be an exclamation point, a question mark, a period, but either way, it was an answer on its own, without words. I decided then and there that I much preferred speaking with my body.


	5. Chapter 5

The party is a writhing, pulsating knot of adolescents and music, loud and dimly lit, with too many people for my comfort. It was Tyndareus' idea, and I gave as little thought to

the guests as I did at all my father's parties; the fact that nine out of ten of them were eligible princes escaped my notice.

And though I was puzzled by the number of young men who sought me out in the corner Agamemnon and I had claimed for our own, the possibility of them being suitors never pierced my brain. They eventually invaded us in such a consistent flow that we could not finish a sentence uninterrupted

"What in Hades?" he asks through gritted teeth, behind the dazzling smile he offered our latest intruder. The boy puts me in mind of the kind I wrestle—big, strong, and overconfident. He mutters titles and a summary of his wealth. I nod curtly and wave him away; he leaves with a baffled look on his face. "I don't think this many boys have talked to you in your _life _as they have this evening!"

"It's only because Helen isn't here," I say back, shaking hands with yet another man who I otherwise ignore. He slinks away like a whipped puppy with his tail between his legs.

"Maybe it's another torture tactic of your father's," grins Agamemnon.

"If it is, then he and Helen planned this together," I snap. "_Poor little Klytie, can't get a man…! _They're trying to make me look even more pathetic than they already think I am!"

Agamemnon shoves the next boy aside and wraps his arms around my shoulders. "If only they had a clue," he laughs into my hair.

"I've had enough of this," I say. "Let's go." I am grinning in spite of myself.

"Get drinks," Agamemnon says with a wink, "and we'll go to the lake." I have a feeling what beer and the lake will lead to. I return his wink and head toward the table of refreshments, heavy laden with trays of food and pre-poured cups of strong Ithakan wine. I skip it all and duck into the kitchen, snatching a tiny amphora and stuffing it into the bodice of my dress.

My mind is already at the lake; I was counting on instinct to help me weave my way through the party room. I feel him even before my brain has registered an obstacle in my path.

I scarcely have time to register his eyes the color of warm brown sugar and fire-red hair that burns like love, before my heart is set pounding by the whisper, "Do you believe in love at first sight or should I ask you to walk by me again?"

I throw a quick glance over my shoulder, scan the crowd behind him, sure his words were meant for some other girl and it was only a mistake that I thought they were for me…but I come up with nothing. _He was talking to me. _"Tantalus Thyestides," he adds, extending his hand.

It takes me a minute to realize that an introduction is expected in return. "I'm crazy!" I blurt. "I mean, _Klytie!" _

The heat rushes to my cheeks, but Tantalus rescues with me a laugh that sounds like summer. "We're all a little crazy," he grins. "At least you admit it!"

The bustle of the crowd forces us closer together. Standing almost on top of him, I am dimly aware of the fact that he can see every part of my body, and that the amphora in my dress must stick out like a third breast. The realization that Agamemnon must still be waiting on me jolts me back to reality.

I am about to explain that I should go, end the conversation I was rather enjoying, when Agamemnon appears out of nowhere and gives Tantalus a blow that sends him reeling. The force of Agamemnon's fist in his face flings him back, overturning the food table. Entire trays are launched halfway across the room, with legs of roasted chicken and bowls of sauce flying at the guests like projectile missiles.

Tantalus staggers to his feet, face dripping with a garish mixture of blood and wine, fists swinging. I get between them just before the next punch is thrown. _"What in Hades!" _I shriek. _"Agamemnon!" _

They stand above me, with clenched fists poised to strike and gashes dripping blood, looking quizzically at me. "What are you doing!" I blurt at last. "You don't just walk up to somebody and _punch_ them!"

Tantalus tries to twist his busted lip into a smile. "We know each other," he says at length.

"Did that worm tell you who is, Klytie?" Agamemnon demands, spitting in Tantalus' face.

I had not made the connection before; realization is slow in dawning on me. _Tantalus Thyestides. _Son of Thyestes. I feel suddenly sick to my stomach. "Oh," I whispered, unable to look at Tantalus.

Agamemnon throws me a triumphant look before shoving me away, so I'm standing off to the side, no longer blocking their battle. "Did your father send you to kill me?" he snarls, advancing on Tantalus as he reaches for his knife. 

"No—"

"_Liar!" _Agamemnon thunders. "All you Thyestides deal in treachery! You thought you'd get to me by seducing Klytie?" His eyes blaze with a fire I have never seen before and I take a step back, almost frightened. He grabs Tantalus by the collar and gets up into his face. "That trick's been tried one time too many and I'm no Atreus! You'll not steal my lover the way you did my mother!"

"Gods damn you!" Tantalus exploded. "I wasn't doing anything of the sort!" He manages to smirk. "You Atreides are all the same—heads so bloated with hubris, you think the whole world revolves around you! I haven't given you a second thought since you ran away like the coward you are! I'm here because Tyndareus invited me! I came to marry Klytie!"

"I'm not marrying him!" I yell, stamping my foot. I sweep my gaze across my father's private sitting room to encompass my father and Agamemnon. "I'm not!"

Tantalus has been shut outside, though I'm sure he'd love to be a fly on the sitting room wall, while Agamemnon and I would kill to get out.

"Klytemnestra…" says Tyndareus, in his walking-on-thin-ice voice. "Tantalus is merely one of the many suitors you met tonight—"

_"Suitors?"_

"That explains everything," Agamemnon mutters to me. I piece together the events of the evening and feel stupid. How could I have not understood the purpose of the party? Or recognized Tantalus' last name?

"Your decision is not required tonight," my father adds dryly. "But by the end of thirty days, you need to at least have some finalists or I'm going to be forced to choose for you."

"Thirty days—!" I gasp. "But I can't…!"

Tyndareus holds up a hand. "It worked for me and your mother"—_And everybody knows how much you hated each other!_—"and it will work for Helen."

When it's Helen's turn, the citadel will be crammed to capacity. Men will swarm like locusts, putting my crowd tonight to shame. All the way around, I decide, I hate this arranged marriage thing! My father's black-like-mine eyes narrow into slits. "Be grateful you have a choice."

Turning to Agamemnon, he adds, "And try not to knock them out, hmm? I have a hard enough time marrying her off! If you start bullying the suitors, I'll never get her out of the house!"

We say, "Yes, sir," when we want to yell _Go to Hades! _and sit through one final lecture before we are returned to the land of the living, free to disregard him. Halfway down the hall, I smack into Tantalus. He laughs aloud and I shake my head. "I just can't seem to stop doing that," I remark.

I am vaguely aware that that alone is too friendly, given the circumstances, knowing who he is. I certainly know how to be harsh! Why can't I do that with him?

He grins and shrugs. "You're a good person to bump into." It sounds enough like flirtation to make Agamemnon mad. He grabs my arm, none too gently, and starts to steer me around Tantalus, to the door. Tantalus waits till Agamemnon is farther out the door than I am, to call my name.

I turn to find him lounging against the door jam, staring into my soul with his kinetic eyes. "Listen, Klytie," he murmurs, "I… I'm sorry about the way things happened tonight. I didn't want you to think badly of me."

"I don't," I say automatically, and realize a second later that it's the truth.

"Good," he says at length. "That's good." A shy smile creeps across his face and he says, "I enjoyed talking to you tonight."

"Yeah," I say very softly. "Me too."

"I'd like to talk to you again," he says, and there is no mistaking his meaning. "Would you have dinner with me tomorrow night? If I promise not to seduce you?"

I laugh aloud. "No man can seduce me if I don't want them to," I assure him. "I'm quite safe."

I started to second-guess that when he came to get me the next night. He took me in his chariot—ocean blue with swirls of gold painted on the sides, and drawn by two white horses—to the beach, and laid out a picnic on the sand.

He spread out a blanket on a little slope that dipped down far enough for the waves to tickle our toes. Our only light was a flickering candle in a little clay pot, and the moon. I noticed the substitution of wine for water and respected him for that. He was not, in any form, trying to seduce me. "This is nice," I murmured, lowering myself onto the blanket beside him. I am trying not to think about Agamemnon, who hasn't spoken to me all day because of this.

"You like it?" A wide grin splits Tantalus' face. He begins unpacking the basket. "I love the beach, but we're landlocked in Mycenae. You're lucky to have one so close."

I am suddenly reminded again of Agamemnon, his delight at seeing the lake when we first met. And yet, it has a different feel altogether. Agamemnon is more like me, craving a mountain stream in the middle of a forest. Tantalus calls to mind the water nymphs, who never stray far from the shore. They are made of hyacinth petals, with seashell crowns, the joy of Poseidon. There's a beachy magic to him I have never before encountered, and I find it strangely enticing. "I like the mountains best," I tell him, desperate to redirect my focus.

He cracks a smile. "You would like Mycenae then. We have mountains and madmen in abundance."

I laugh around a mouthful of roast duck. "Sounds like my kind of place!"

Tantalus winks. "You should visit sometime." I narrow my eyes and he holds up a hand in surrender. "Was that too much?" I nod. "I'm sorry," he murmurs. "I'm trying. I just find it hard to keep from flirting with you."

"And why is that?" I demand, crossing my arms over my breasts. "Why did you come here in the first place? You'd never seen me before last night!" Tantalus hesitates just a moment, and stares at me longer, until his gaze grows almost uncomfortable. He has the look of a messenger about to deliver the news to a king who does not yet know his country is doomed. _"What?" _I exclaim.

He bites down hard on his lip. "I'm sorry," he says at length. "You might as well know."

The way he says it is with such bitterness, such resignation, I almost put up a hand to stop him. When his words stand before me, tangible in the night air, what might they do to my life? "I want to get married," he tells me. "I want a family. But every woman I've asked has turned me down—because of mine." I comb through my memory, trying to recall Thyestes' list of atrocities, but cannot come up with anything that would mean something to anyone other than Agamemnon, least of all some princess in another city-state. I stare at him blankly. Tantalus heaves a sigh. "You don't know?" he exclaims. I shake my head. "Gods!" he cries. "You're perfect!"

I wave aside his comment with a hand. "What's wrong with your family?"

He hesitates. "I don't want to be the one to tell you."

"Do it," I order, "or I'll get it from Agamemnon."

"_Hades," _he mutters, rubbing his temples. "You couldn't make it easy on me!" I shake my head, grinning, just because I can. He rakes a hand through his flowing red hair and leaned a hand back on the sand to steady himself.

"All right," he says finally. "My father is Thyestes—and I swear to gods, I'm nothing like him! He's crazy, Klytie. Sick in the head in the worst way. He slept with Agamemnon's mother to steal Atreus' throne, but when Atreus found about it, he killed Aerope and my half-brothers. He boiled them up in a stew and served them to my father."

Tantalus cracks a smile when I gasp. "That's the part Agamemnon doesn't want you to know. The part my side doesn't want getting out is the one where Thyestes became a cannibal and started hunting the people of Mycenae to eat." He sighs heavily. "There's a triple curse on our House. My family's made up of madmen and murderers. That's why no woman will marry me." He offers me a weary smile. "Believe me, I've been all across Achaea." So he comes to me—the last on the list. My father will see only the alliance with golden Mycenae; it matters nothing to him that he would be giving his daughter into a family of cannibalistic lunatics.

The look on my face must be too obvious. "You hate me, don't you?" Tantalus asks. He slams his fist into the sand. "Gods damn Thyestes! He doesn't have a clue what he's done to my life—and he wouldn't give a fig if he did!"

"I don't hate you," I said very softly. "I hate my father. And yours, now. But I don't hate you."

His eyes, when he raises them, are round with surprise. "You…don't?"

"My mother was a whore," I said very softly. "My sister Helen, my brothers… People say they're the children of Zeus, that my mother slept with him when he took the form of a swan. I'm the mortal one. They don't care about me. And I know what it's like to have people label you because of something your parents did."

Tantalus' eyes go wide and soft. "You do understand," he murmurs.

"I do. And right now, I know more about what other people _think _of you than who you are. I want to meet _you_."

The warmth of his smile envelopes me even as it steals across his face. "Ladies first."

I can't help grinning. "Fine then," I say, stretching out on the sand. For one brief moment, I panic, wondering how in Hades to present myself. I don't bother with introductions much; I don't try to make friends. But here and now, I decide that if I have to give an introduction, I will make it the best in Sparta.

"My name is Klytie-_never_-Klytemnestra-Tyndariad. I'd rather wrestle than dance, and according to my tutor, I can't decorate, since the only colors I like are black and red. I can swim, run, shoot, and throw a discus farther than most of the boys in town. I'm thirty seconds older than my sister and it _does _count. I was born in the deepest, most depressing part of winter, the day a scorpion crawled out of its hole and stung itself on the head.

Nobody remembers that about Helen, just me. Everybody says I'm bad luck." Delivering it with my usual apathy takes some effort; I realize with a start that some part of me hopes this boy will like me. I lower my eyes, attempting to look up at him through my lashes, but I'm pretty sure I just look cross-eyed.

"Pleasure to meet you," Tantalus laughs, extending his hand. "My turn?" I nod. He loosens the belt on his kilt and tucks his feet under him, still leaning back on that one hand.

"All right. I'm not too fond of being named after a deranged murderer; I'd change my name but I've gotten used to answering to it. I could swim before I could walk. In an ideal world, I would run away with a beautiful woman and become a traveling poet, and settle down on the beach after I'd seen all Achaea." His cheeks color crimson. "I never told anybody that before."

"I think it's nice," I say sincerely. "I think about that kind of thing, too—what I'd do if I wasn't—"

"My father's pawn," he finishes with me. We stare into each other's eyes for a moment too long, and I feel as if he's looking into my soul. That's when I have to pull away. I don't know what he's seeing there, or if he likes it. "What would you do, Klytie?" he whispers. "If you could do anything at all?"

My heart beats heavy in my breast. This was the stuff of my secret dreams, the things I hadn't shared even with Agamemnon. "Go to the Olympics," I say finally. "Compete in every event." And, while we're talking about the impossible… "And _win!_ Find somebody I loved, who loved me back, and marry them regardless of what they could bring my father. Go away with him and have a dozen children, and teach them to be their own person. To stand up for themselves. To dream."

My voice trails off as the fear of voicing my thoughts creeps over me. But my fear of never telling anyone is stronger, and in the end, I have to blurt it out. "If I could do anything at all, I'd do what I haven't been brave enough to do yet. I'd turn people's heads, and _make_ them give me the attention they've denied me all my life!

I'd find a way to make people like Helen and Tyndareus seen for what they are, so decent people might get a chance in life! I want to go to places I've never seen, where people don't speak my language and it's a whole different world! I want to sail across the entire ocean and see what's on the other side!

I want to fall in love, Tantalus! I want to feel a passion so hot it smothers everything else, that turns my world upside down and washes everything away. I want to love somebody enough to die for them, and be loved that way in return! I want to laugh till I cry and cry till I laugh, and give myself the freedom to get mad enough to tear my hair out by the roots.

Just once, I want to stop _talking _about not caring what everybody thinks, and really _feel _that way! I want to go as far away as I can and throw off everything I've ever known, and keep myself, but start all over.

For once in my life, I want somebody to put me first. I want them to touch me like I'm made of glass, and look at me like I'm a masterpiece, the best and last one ever made. I want to be my own person and never, ever have to be what somebody else demands!"

I reach for a cup of water to cool my flaming cheeks, and gulp it down fast, because if I don't keep talking, I'll stop and never be able to start again. "Hades, Tantalus, I want to rule! An entire city-state! I think I'd be good at that!"

"I have no doubt you would," he says earnestly.

"I want to do something big," I whisper. "I don't know what it is, but my chance is out there! I'm going to make a name for myself that will last when my body turns to dust." I stop there, breathing hard, nostrils flaring, half-daring him to tell me I should not want these things.

Tantalus' eyes are wide when he reaches across the space between us to take both of my hands in one of his, and squeeze them tight. "You are amazing," he breathes, "and don't ever let anybody tell you otherwise!" He shakes his head, lips parted slightly.

"I swear…you are a woman without peer." I am spent from the passion of all the things I never voiced before. I am being given the compliment of my life, and I cannot even find words to thank him. "Keep talking," Tantalus gasps, eyes aglow. "Tell me everything!"

"Everything?" I repeated, numb.

"I'll help you," he laughs. "Gods, I've never had so much fun! If you were an animal, what would you be?"

"A cat," I said without hesitation. "They have such power!"

Tantalus cocks his head, staring at me curiously. "I always thought 'sweet and cozy' when I thought of kitty cats."

"Ah," I said, holding up a finger to prove my point. "That's the trick. They look fluffy and harmless, but they're manipulative. They charm people into giving them whatever they want. They can fend for themselves, but at the end of the day, they like to come home to an accommodating lap and a bed by the fire. Besides, cats have an _attitude _that's not that much different from mine."

"'Catittude," grinned Tantalus.

I laughed out loud. "What animal would you be?"

He considers. "I've never known the answer to that question," he says at length. "I just wanted to know what you'd say!"

"Then I'll have to figure it out for you!" I cried, not quite willing to admit that I can't remember the last time I laughed this hard and this much—or enjoyed myself like this. "I think you're an owl," I tell him finally.

"Cats eat owls!" he exclaims.

"Not this cat with this owl," I promise.

"Why am I an _owl?"_

"Because owls are smart and dreamy and cuddly, and…" At the risk of flirting, I venture, "And they have big, beautiful eyes."

Tantalus makes a soft hooting noise like an owl. "You like my eyes?"

"I do," I confess.

"Yours make you look like a dark goddess," he says. "You're Hekate."

Hekate—goddess of ghosts and witchcraft. Stories say she was often found at the scene of unspeakable crimes—but whether to guide the victims safely to Hades or tell the killer how to get away, no one could say for sure.

On the night of the equinox, she wandered the towns with a retinue of spirits, invisible to all save the dogs who can scent her.

Most people don't believe in her, but no one can deny that every dog in the town goes crazy at the equinox. "I love Hekate," I tell him.

Tantalus shrieks with laughter. "You _love Hekate?" _he repeats. "She's the goddess of murderers!"

"That's why she's interesting!" I protest. "And that's another thing I'll do one day—join the Cult of Hekate."

"I'll make myself scarce on that day," he grins. Then he leans forward, strands of red hair falling into his eyes, hands resting on his his knees, ready for the next question. "Do you believe in the gods?"

"No. They don't believe in me."

"Good answer," he says, grinning. "I do believe. For one thing, I think that's been my family's mistake—complete and total disregard for the laws of gods and men. I don't want to follow in their footsteps. And I think people need something to believe in in this world. It makes you feel like you have a purpose…you know?"

I didn't know. I had never much felt like I had a purpose. "That's a nice way to think of it," I say. "I never considered that before."

"Maybe I'll convert you," he says, winking.

I whoop. "You've got your work cut out for you!"

He shrugs good-naturedly and asks, "If you were going to die in the next hour, what would you do differently?"

I must have been possessed. I can think of no other reason I did it. But I did it, by Hades! Approximately five seconds after he asked me that question, I leaned across the sand between us and kissed him.

It has been thirty days since Tantalus Thyestides first arrived in Lacedaemon. And though I have tried hard to forget my agreement, I know my father has not. Tomorrow, on the first day of a new month, I will have to make my choice. I have given no thought to the other suitors, cannot even remember their names.

For thirty days, I have seen only Tantalus. His face is constantly before me, the last thing I see when I close my eyes at night, and the first when I open them. He makes it hard to breathe, to sleep, to carry on a conversation. And Agamemnon avoids me like the plague.

We swam naked in the Eurotas River at midnight, diving down deep and pressing tight against each other in the dark water. A sliver of moonlight cut through the blue-black film of the water, highlighting ghostly silver snatches of Tantalus' body. I tangle my fingers in the forest of hair in his chest, lace my toes with his, and let out the breath I'd been holding.

Water did not instantly fill my lungs, as I'd expected; for one perfect millisecond, my mouth fit perfectly with his and our tongues danced as our bodies coupled.

He entered me slowly; I had not known that the same act could feel so different when performed by two different men. But Tantalus is a practiced lover and it shows in his every move. I withdraw my mouth from his for just a moment, gasping in torturous ecstasy, and that's when the water rushes in.

We break free of each other in an instant, clawing our way to the surface. I suck in air for one blissful moment, free of inhibition. I pay dearly for my second of freedom—my inhibitions return seven-fold to choke me. I cannot look at him. I do not know what to say.

I took another shaky breath and climbed out of the river without another glance at Tantalus. My questions swirled around in my brain like butter in a churn. I ached to voice them but my pride refused to bear a critique on my performance. I flung my dark purple tunic over my head, fumbling with the knotted belt around my waist. Tantalus hauls himself out of the water, dark hair matted and hanging over his eyes.

He resembled nothing so much as a sheepdog. "Klytie!" He senses my anxiety without even seeing me. This month, I have become one with this boy, melded together in a way that unnerves me. Almost as if my mind has turned to glass, so transparent that Tantalus can see everything in me, regardless of my efforts at seclusion.

I refuse to answer him, yanking on both my sandals at once. My wet feet turns the leather unwieldy; I tie the straps in pitiful knots around my ankles and run with the speed that won me gold medals on the race track. Tantalus doesn't bother with dressing before he comes after me. Without warning, he tackles me from behind; I lay prone on the knotty earth, crushed under the wet, naked weight of him."Let me go!" I shriek, struggling. He grins down at me. I am a wrestler; I could kill him if I wanted to. He knows I'm not even trying.

"Klytie," he says, grinning. "Klytie, listen to me. This has been the best thirty days of my life. I've never met anybody like you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, till I know you inside out. I know it's going to take time, and…I know I don't have much to offer you, but…"

A broad smile stretches across his dark face as he kneels before me. "Tantalus…" My hand flutters within his; my voice is not my own.

"I don't have a ring," he falters. "I don't even have any clothes! But if I don't ask you now, I'll never have the guts to!" Everything happens like lightning just then. He blurts the words out without punctuation—"Klytie Tyndariad will you marry me?"

"_Gods damn it, Agamemnon, would you just talk to me!" _I stand in the middle of my bedroom floor, surrounded by trunks that will soon hold all my possessions. Autumn sunlight hits random patterns in my curtains, throwing golden cult-symbols onto the marble floor.

Agamemnon is half-way out my door, back turned—but this is what he does, these days: follows me around like a hunting hound, stalking me, but refusing to speak.

Agamemnon turns on his heel, eyes flaming. "What would you have me say?" he snaps. "I couldn't talk you out of it."

All at once, I am tired, so tired, and I don't know how to make myself say the right things. If I tell him what I want to say—that I want us to be friends forever, that I don't know what to do with myself when he acts like this—he'll call me a whore, lumping me into the same category with Leda and Helen and Aerope. He especially compares me to his mother these days.

"I'm _not _Aerope," I say finally. "And Tantalus isn't Thyestes. I never wanted to hurt you like this." I know, even as I say it, that he won't believe me. But I can't live with myself if I don't try.

"Of course," he says, lip curling in a sneer. "Why should I be hurt? All you did was show me how little I meant to you!"

"Tyndareus set me up!" I cried. "I never saw Tantalus in my life before that night! You know it! He set me up, and then it just sort of…happened."

"You had a choice," he insists.

"And what would you have me do, Agamemnon?" I snap. "Run off and marry _you?"_

"Yes!"

It takes me a moment to realize what he said, and even longer to grasp that where I was sarcastic, he was serious. I spend almost a full minute blinking, mouth open in shock, before I can even manage, _"What?"_

Agamemnon is near hysterical, wild with his illusion. "Yes!" he cries, as if he didn't even hear me. "We could go—far away—I would take care of you, I…"

"Agamemnon!" I scream. "Stop! Just…_stop! _What in Hades are you saying?"

His whole face changes in that moment; he looks like I just slapped him. "I love you, Klytie," he says without hesitation. "I always thought—"

The world around me starts to spin and I am paralyzed. "You…what?"

"Well, of course," he says, with an awkward laugh. He is trying to save the situation, to cover for me, and pretend I feel the same. "Haven't we always…?" I am shaking my head so hard it's liable to fall off. He, in turn, is opening and closing his mouth in confusion. We do it in a strange rhythm, like an awkward dance. At long last, Agamemnon blurts, "Then what about…the sex? The kisses? The…?"

"That meant nothing!" I cry, and I realize too late I have said entirely the wrong thing. As his face twists in horror, I gasp, "I didn't mean it, Agamemnon!" But he's already heading for the door. "No!" I shriek, clutching his arm.

"You have to listen, I didn't mean it like that! I just…" He turns, begging me with his eyes to save this. He was broken long before I met him; I have always known it. There is little room for forgiveness in his heart—but he will try with me, if I can meet him halfway.

My head swims with the enormity of the moment; my tongue turns thick as fleece. "I didn't…ask for that," I say haltingly, trying to make him understand, without a clue in Hades how to do it.

"But you wanted to keep doing it," he sneers.

"Yes!" For a moment, I think this is the right answer, and then the hatred in his eyes freezes me. I am unused to feeling this way; Agamemnon was always transparent with me. I knew him better than I knew myself! When did understanding him get so hard?

"You used me," Agamemnon hisses, with barely controlled fury. I have never seen him so angry; for a moment, I think he will strike me, but my fear cannot suppress me for long.

"_I did not! _Think about it, Agamemnon! Did I ever—even once!—ask you to sleep with me? Did I ever suggest, in any way, that I loved you?" He is stunned into silence, unmoving, unspeaking before me. I take a chance and venture closer to him, resting my palm on his cheek.

"You're my dearest friend," I tell him. "You're the other half of me. I love you _that _way! But the way I feel about Tantalus…" I take a step back and shake my head. "I can't go there with you."

I can't explain what I was thinking, those nights when he made me his own. I had never seen us as more than friends… But after that first night, I had desired him. I did not know how to explain it; it was all tangled up inside me and we had never talked about it. Had that been because he thought it was so simple?

Blood was hot and passion high; in the tangle of moonlight and wet sheets, when I drank in his musky scent, and held him tight against my breasts, it was easy to see how I might have imagined that I loved him.

I had never been able to imagine a future without Agamemnon in it; maybe, if I had never met Tantalus, I would have married Agamemnon just because I didn't want to run the risk of life taking us in two separate directions. But I had always put marriage in another corner of my mind, as though happening to somebody other than me.

And the fact remained that the passion I envisioned could never have happened with Agamemnon. I had the feeling that these were the things I needed to say, but could not find the words to tell him. It would make no difference if I tried. So I say the only thing left for me to say—"I'm sorry."

His face is almost purple with fury. _"Whore!" _he screams. "You'll rot in Hades!" For the first time in my life, I stand there and take it, without saying a word.

He rants on, piercing my heart with a barrage of word-darts laced with a poison that slowly infects my whole body. Tonight will be Hades, reflecting on his words in the darkness, with no way to bandage the wounds. "You were supposed to be mine," Agamemnon says with quiet menace. An odd smile spreads over his face, setting his eyes afire with a glow that makes my blood run cold. "If I can't have you, no one can."

**Six Months Later**

We lay awake on a hillside, under a canopy of stars. Tantalus' fingers are laced through mine, his hand cups my swollen stomach as if the little life growing within me is the first baby to ever be born. "Do you ever wonder," asks Tantalus, a smile creeping into his voice, "what parts of each of us he'll have?" Nothing had yet been proven, but neither of us had any doubt that our child would be a son.

"Gods," I say, "I hope he gets your eyes! I hate mine."

Tantalus brushes my eyelids closed with a finger and kisses them. "I love your eyes." I make a gagging sound. "And your freckles," Tantalus adds. "He needs to have your freckles!"

"I _despise _my freckles! Did you know, the year I was twelve, I tried _everything _to get them off! Lemon juice—I spent a fortune on potions for a clear complexion! When that didn't work, I tried scraping them off."

Tantalus guffaws. "_Scraping _them, Klytie?"

"I did!" A pause. "Twelve wasn't my best year."

He grins and shakes his head. "I love you. That's why I hope he turns out _just like you."_

"We still have to name him," I point out.

"That's the part that scares me," he mutters. "Look what we got stuck with! What if we inherited our parents' naming curse?" I giggle. I hadn't thought of it that way.

"Really!" Tantalus insists. "Who can look at a baby in a cradle and of all things, think _Klytemnestra?"_

I shriek with laughter. "I always wanted to ask my father that! And while we're at it, why _Tantalus? _They're going to name you after a madman who served his son to the gods? Nice stuff for a baby to live up to!"

The mood changes instantly and Tantalus shrugs. "In my family, that would probably be considered success."

There's another pause, the longest that has ever been between us. "Tantalus," I whisper, "what's your family really like?"

Tantalus jerks bolt upright. "No." His voice is low and cold. "I can't tell you that, Klytie."

"Why not?" I persist. "You've met all of mine! I don't even know yours' names!"

"Thyestes-Pelopia-Aegisthus." Tantalus rattles off the three words like they're one. "There," he snaps. "Now you know them."

"I don't know them at all!" I cry. "What are they _like? _I want to see everything." I reach for his hand. "I want to know what made you into the man I love."

"It was more a matter of trying my hardest to make sure I was nothing like them," he mutters.

"Then I want to see that, too." I lean over to kiss his cheek. "Was it really so terrible, Tantalus?"

He squeezes his eyes tight shut. "You don't know who they are, Klytemnestra. You don't know what they did."

"But—the cannibalism…? The children…?"

"That's barely scratching the surface!" he snarls. "Everything I told you is common knowledge around here. If you got any deeper, knew what all the rest of us who'd lived it knew, you'd run as fast as you could."

"I can't run now," I say, nibbling his ear. "We're married, and I don't believe in divorce. Murder, I'd consider. But never divorce." He cracks a smile and blows out his breath in a long, heavy sigh that rearranges the hair plastered down on his forehead. "You know my stories, Tantalus," I add. "You could be scared of me."

He jerks up in shock. "Never!"

"Then I won't be of you."

He heaves a sigh and lays back down with his head on his folded arms. "Pelopia is Thyestes' new wife. They've been married for near seven years now, and she's two years older than me." My eyes bulge and Tantalus nods, disgusted. "Thyestes likes them young," he snarls and then pauses in a way that indicates the story is finished.

"And Aegisthus?" I ask. "Your…brother?"

"_Half-_brother!" Tantalus spat. "We have Thyestes in common and that's too much. Aegisthus looks like Pelopia, but he's the image of Thyestes at heart. I guess it figures. Thyestes specially bred him."

"_Bred_ him?" I repeated. It was not the word one associated with parent and child. "How…?"

"Don't ask me that, Klytie," Tantalus says. His voice is hard and sharp, like a knife being scraped against a rock. For a moment, I say nothing, and Tantalus throws himself onto the grass again. "Aegisthus," he hisses, "is a monster. Keep in mind, he's seven. At seven, I was trying to figure out why the right shoe wouldn't go on the left foot. Aegisthus has already killed a man.

And he loved it. He came home and played with the blood on the sword like other children play with finger paint. He's always been like that, Klytie. When he was three, he took all the knives from the kitchen and put them around Pelopia while she slept. Knife after knife stuck into the bed, the whole length of her body.

He got a kitten one year for his birthday, and the very next morning, we found it gutted in the living room." His eyes narrow. "That child scares me, Klytemnestra. And there's not many things on this earth that do." For a moment, I am stunned into silence.

"I tell you all this," Tantalus says finally, "but unless you meet him, you won't be able to feel the chill that goes all over you when he touches you. You can't look in his eyes and see the gaping black hole where there's supposed to be a conscience. That child is the spawn of the devil. He should have been killed at birth."

"I want to meet them!" I blurt. "Your family."

"_What?"_ He sits bolt upright and blinks at me. "I tell you horror stories and you want to _meet them?"_

"Tantalus, I really do! I can't believe you could be related… These people sound like something from a tragedy!"

"That's exactly what it is," he mutters, "but they're real."

"I want to see for myself!"

"You really don't, Klytemnestra. Trust me."

"But everybody meets the in-laws…" I wheedle.

"Everybody doesn't have _murderous _in-laws!" I roll over on my side and widen my eyes imploringly. Tantalus shrugs and heaves a sigh. "Fine. But if I start to notice things—even if it seems like nothing to you—we're leaving."

"What kind of things?" I ask, suddenly apprehensive.

Tantalus gnaws his lower lip for a moment. "They're not normal, Klytie. They could eat you alive."

The House of the Axe crouched low on a hill that dropped, without warning, into a precipitous ravine.

It was nearing sunset, not yet time for the shadows to approach, but the House had a dark quality to it, as though it was waiting to swallow you whole and spit your bones into the ravine. The walls, a faint gold, shimmered with evil. This place had been Agamemnon's home, and then Tantalus'. How, I wondered, could anyone raise a family here?

The air all around me grew very cold, as though an angry ghost had touched Mycenae with its fingertips, turning the air frigid blue. The dust on the road flew up in thick clouds and breathing took an odd amount of effort. I tasted blood with every puff of it I drew into my lungs. Tantalus keeps his eyes locked on the dusty road before us, refusing even to look at his childhood home.

I dare a glance upward and see the hard, firm line of his jaw and the emerald eyes that have turned suddenly to steel. He has not spoken a word to me since we set out. "Is it true," I whispered to Tantalus, "that criminals are thrown into that ravine?"

"Criminals?" Tantalus echoes. His voice has a harsh, mocking quality that is unlike him. "They throw unwanted babies down there. And anyone else they want rid of."

"Who does it?"

"Who else?" he snaps. "My father." The dirt road changes suddenly to limestone, but the air becomes harder to breathe, if anything, the closer we get to the House. Tantalus jerks his head suddenly upward, mutters faintly, "The Lion Gate."

I look up just in time to catch the gaze of the two stone lionesses flanking the massive structure. I crane my neck back as the chariot rumbles forward, unable to look away from them. Maybe I stared at them too long. It could easily have been a trick of the mind. But I would have sworn on my mother's grave that the eyes of those stone carvings moved in position for just a fraction of a second and locked with mine.

My heart shivers as though stroked by a cold knife. _The lions knew something I didn't._

When the Gate swung shut behind me, it would never open again. Not till I had seen every evil the House of the Axe had to show me. Not until my brain had been re-wired and my heart eaten out by the lions. Then and only then, would they cast me out, a shell of my former self.

I find that I am trembling from head to toe; I huddle at the bottom of the chariot platform, wrapped in my cloak so that only my eyes show, shaking like one with the palsy. My eyes flick upward to meet those of my husband, but Tantalus stares at me with all the warmth of the lionesses. "This was your idea," he says in a voice like gravel. "Let's go."

Surely the King of Mycenae had come to his dinner table straight from the underworld, dressed in the Lord of the Dead's black robes. Thyestes must have been nearing sixty, but his hair and beard, solid black, were untouched by gray. I felt all over him the blood he had shed, but Thyestes was not a warrior.

It was innocent blood he had spilled, kindred's blood. It was the ghosts of his victims that haunted the yard, their blood that cried up from the ground. He rises from his seat when I enter the room and stares at me for a minute too long, looking like he wants to unhinge his jaw and swallow me alive right there.

"Tantalus!" the king exclaims, stretching out his arms to his son. Tantalus narrows his eyes, just daring Thyestes to touch him. "I had no idea you had married!" His eyes flick once more over the whole length of my body. "And certainly not to such a _beautiful _woman!" Thyestes licks his lips. "Gods almighty, she's beautiful."

I, who have stripped naked before an entire town, suddenly find myself blushing under the scorching gaze of one man. Thyestes sees that. And he likes it. I stand by Tantalus' side, beaming waves of cordial hatred at my father-in-law. _Pervert! _

Tantalus says tightly, "She wanted to meet my family."

"Polite _and _pretty!" Thyestes exclaims. His gaze, which has never left me, grows only more intense, when he says, "I appreciate you not allowing my son to be so rude as to go without introducing us!" As though my husband is not standing right there, his hand snakes toward the bodice of my dress.

"My dear, I do believe you have something on your dress…" I slap his hand with all the force of a wrestler, eliciting a grimace from Thyestes and a little shriek from the white-faced woman sitting at one end of the very long table.

"You will _not _touch me there, sir," I hiss, looking Thyestes right in the eye.

For just a fraction of a second, his mouth swings open and hangs there. But he quickly resumes his fox's smile and says between clenched teeth to Tantalus, "Wherever did you find her, son?"

"Lacedaemon," I pipe up. "I am Princess Klytemnestra of Sparta." A pause for added effect and then, "My father is King Tyndareus."

Thyestes blinks rapidly. "Of course," he mutters at length. "I know Tyndareus well." That part is true, but to tell the whole truth, he would have to admit that my father despises him and vice versa, and I don't imagine Thyestes speaks the truth often if ever. There's a moment of awkward silence and Thyestes clears his throat a few times before turning finally to the young woman at the table and blurting, "Have you met my wife Pelopia?"

She is older than I first supposed; the twenty-one-year-old could be mistaken for my sixteen. She is petite, with a skin untouched by sunlight, and huge dark eyes that look as if she was frightened very badly as a child and never quite got over it.

Sleek dark hair escapes in loose ringlets from a golden coronet and her pale pink lips flutter hesitantly over the jewel-encrusted goblet of wine she raises to them. This girl must be Queen of Mycenae; the solid gold dishes, the jeweled cups—Hades, even this monstrous House!—belong to her, and yet she seems fearful of being punished for even looking at them.

"You're his wife?" I exclaim, stalking over to her and taking her hand. _"My condolences!"_

Tantalus barely stifles his laughter, and quickly goes into a coughing fit when Thyestes cuts his eyes at him. "Do sit down," Pelopia begs in a barely audible whisper. "The food will get cold."

The scraping of chair-legs against tile, and then fork against plate, is the only sound in the dining-room for quite some time, until finally Thyestes licks a droplet of wine from his lips and—still looking at me—asks his wife, "Was Aegisthus planning on joining us for dinner?"

"I told him to," Pelopia croaks.

"_You told him to?" _Thyestes mocks. "You couldn't get the best-trained dog in Achaea to follow your directions!" He shakes his head. "No spirit. And we wonder why that boy runs wild!" He turns and mumbles something to one of the dozen servants lining the wall behind the table like paintings. The man disappears up a staircase I hadn't even noticed.

"Tell us about yourself, Klytemnestra," says Pelopia, in a voice so low I have to strain to hear her. Her haunted eyes beg for a morsel of kindness and I realize then that she has no women friends, perhaps has no one who will talk to her.

"Klytie," I correct. "Please. You can call me Klytemnestra if you want to, but I might get the feeling you're slightly mad at me." I offer what I hope is a self-effacing smile and refuse to let myself look at Tantalus and Thyestes, to gauge their reactions.

"Klytie, then," Pelopia returns, this time with a smile that looks less stilted, _genuine. _"Where did you say you were from?"

"Sparta," I answer, smiling again. I have never in my life smiled this much. By the end of the evening, my face is going to hurt.

"What is it like there?" she asks eagerly. "I've always wanted to travel, but Thyestes doesn't care for it."

My reply is interrupted by the entrance of the boy who makes his way down the staircase, taking the steps as if each one is a nation to be conquered. His footsteps are catlike, inaudible; one felt his presence long before they had any sign of his coming. I had pictured an awkward child with stubborn remnants of baby fat clinging to his gangly body. But the boy who approached the table would more easily be a taken for a young adolescent than a seven-year-old.

It was mad—almost perverted!—I was nearly old enough to be the mother of this child! But my first glimpse of him took my breath. _Aegisthus Thyestides was flawless._ His dark hair was carelessly slung into a ponytail, as though he didn't even notice his perfection.

Madness shimmered beneath the waves in the deep dark pools of his eyes and his full lips twist in a smile when he sees me. He stares at me with an expression that is something of a cross between the look of his father and the stone lions on the gate. My skin crawls.

Aegisthus takes his seat between his parents, exactly eye-level with me. "So this is my sister-in-law." His voice is unusually deep for a child, with a sexy purr I didn't think attainable for a boy of seven.

Forcing myself to behave as I would with any common child takes almost more effort than I possess. I remain in my seat, instead of standing to acknowledge his presence, and reach a hand across the table. "Klytie."

His fingers lace through mine, slowly, deliberately, and his hand stays within mine just long enough to cross the boundary of friendship. "Aegisthus." His eyes scan my body and linger, just like his father's, on my breasts.

They might have stayed there all evening if Pelopia hadn't leaned over to smack his arm and hiss, _"Aegisthus!" _She might never have spoken for all the attention he paid her.

I snap my fingers in the air near my face. "Eyes up here," I say firmly, encompassing father and son with a look. Pelopia lowers her head in shame, mouths, _I'm sorry! _

Aegisthus grins in a way that makes my blood run cold. "I saw you in my dream," he whispers. His mouth does not for a moment shift out of that demonic smile. "I'm going to marry you one day."

The room grows suddenly very still. I am frozen in my chair, too numb to react. In the end, it Tantalus who breaks the silence. "Would you steal her from me?" he demands. I know him well enough to see how much effort it takes to muster that mocking tone. Aegisthus sees it too, and reads his power over Tantalus, over me.

Aegisthus shakes his head, still smiling. "I won't have to. You won't have her long enough."

**Ten Months Later**

He came out of nowhere, the culmination of all my nightmares. I had envisioned every detail of the destruction, but I had not expected _him._

In my nightmares, it was always Thyestes or Aegisthus, swooping in to take me for himself. I could never have imagined Agamemnon, riding in on the tails of his newest victory—the claiming of the House at Mycenae—and tiptoeing into my world on cat's feet, with orders _from my father _to destroy what Tantalus and I had worked for.

All my life, I had been a pawn for my father. I learned that night that it was never to end. My happiness, as always, was nothing. My match with Tantalus had not been made through Thyestes; my father had not gotten the treaty with Mycenae after all. Now, he saw a new opportunity through Agamemnon; Sparta's alliance with the new young King of Mycenae was more important than my "fairy-tale" in Pisa.

I remember that night in bits and snatches, fragment pieces of a nightmare puzzle. Every time I close my eyes, I see the flickering of the flames as they dance over my house at Pisa, gracefully destroying everything I held dear.

I hear the crackling of the fire as it breaks apart everything in its way, silently turns bones to dust. The smell of rotting flesh, mingled with blood and urine, mixed together to form a scent bouquet that embodies every horror of the evening.

Even if I could forget the sights—the sword sprouting from Tantalus' chest, the slow blackening of his body as the fire swept over him—or the sounds—Tantalus' strangled groan as the sword entered him, the gurgling gasp as his life bled out—I could never forget the smell. It lingers within me forever and I will never wash it off.

I saw my baby boy, who had just turned a month old that evening, torn from my breast and slung by his heel across the courtyard. One last little shriek pierced the air, and then there was the sickening thud. Like the sound of an onion being crushed by a knife. His tiny head squished the wall upon impact and his corpse fell to the ground in slow motion.

The fire surged up to eat him, blood and bones, before he even hit the dirt. And it was my father who sanctioned the carnage. I did not get to bury them, give them the funerals they deserved. I could not honor them—but I drank their blood.

The murderer of my husband and son grabbed my hair in his fist and forced my mouth down on the wound; blood from Tantalus' corpse, still warm, gushed into my mouth and I reeled back, choking and vomiting. Again and again, he pressed my mouth to the wound until blood smeared my face and sat heavy in my gut. Till it was all I could see and smell and taste.

When he was satisfied, Agamemnon Atreides flung me over Tantalus' body and took me hard, shoving into me again and again. When he had emptied himself into me, taken everything I had fought to keep, he held and caressed me as though we were lovers. He spooned against my back, entering me gently from behind, crooning of the sons I would give him and the life we would have together.


	6. Chapter 6

He carried me over the threshold and set me down tenderly in the living room floor, ignoring my screaming and the scratch I managed to get in that leaves a jagged pink scar just below his eye. He stares at me like he did on our very first night, but his eyes gleam with an unholy obsession. He is caked to the forearm with black blood, hands dripping gore.

My husband's blood, my baby's blood. I hear their cries as he takes my face in his hands, feel Tantalus and Agathon all over me as he caresses my cheeks and eyelids, presses his thin, dry lips against mine, trembling and stained by Tantalus' corpse.

"There," he murmurs, pulling away to run his fingers through my hair. Flakes of ash and clumps of blood are tangled within the black masses. Agamemnon separates the strands with care. "Tyndareus saw sense. He knew you needed to be with me."

His calm is unnatural, and the steady, ironic monotone is so unlike him it makes my skin crawl. "My husband!" I shriek. "My baby!" People _died _tonight in the cruelest ways; it calls for an outburst, not his freakish serenity!

"Yes," says Agamemnon gently. "They blinded you; they're gone now. You'll come back to yourself soon enough."

"_Monster!" _I howl, beating his chest with my fists. I am strong enough to hurt him and he knows it, but he just stands there and takes it, staring at me with a look of sappy adoration. "Rapist! Baby-killer!"

"You may call me that if you like," he says with easy resignation. "I know you love me."

"I hate you!" I scream, tearing at my hair. "I hate your bones! I hate your blood! I'll kill you, if it takes me a lifetime of waiting!"

He only smiles indulgently, and takes my land, leading me up the stairs like a toddler. "I decorated your rooms for you," he tells me proudly, leading me down a black hallway.

I can barely see my hand in front of my face, and am forced to walk close beside him. I wonder dimly if he didn't plan it this way. A door opens out of nowhere; he pulls me inside and shuts it quickly behind him to prevent me from running while he fumbles to light the candle in his hand. He makes his way around the room, lighting the torches interspersed across the room. "There!" he crows, triumphant. He turns to me with anxious eyes, watching me as I take in the room.

The walls are varied shades of red, my favorite color in all its moods. The furnishings are rich and the fringed rugs are no doubt imported from Persia. There is a loom in one corner, and a shelf full of scrolls. He remembered my love for philosophy, I noted.

Painted wooden tables with borders of cult symbols and flowers, in swirling red and black, are companions to a few velvet chairs. Something on one table catches his eye; he darts across the room with the matches to light a cluster of candles in decorated clay pots.

"Jasmine," he says as the fragrance fills the air. When I say nothing, he adds, "Your favorite! Remember?" as if I had forgotten.

When I refuse to give him a reaction, I see that deep down, he is still a fractious little boy, anxious to please. "That's just the sitting room," he mutters. "Never mind that." He flutters to a door in one wall of the sitting room, holding it for me as if chivalry can make up for the atrocities he committed this evening. "It's all right," he says, half reassuring himself. "I only spent a month designing that."

He ushers me into the adjoining scarlet room, where a bed sits front and center. The fleeces are thick and red with black tassels that blend with the mosaic tile floor.

The ceiling is dark as a night sky, but the stars painted into it are crimson. A wooden dresser, finely carved, takes its place directly across from the bed; a hand-held bronze mirror and collection of cosmetics are clustered on it. Agamemnon has long planned my arrival. "Do you like it?" he asks me anxiously. "I can have it all redone, if you don't…"

I dismiss him with a shrug and cross the room to the bed, turning back the tasseled coverlet. "Leave me," I said with all the energy I could muster. "I will sleep alone tonight."

"I thought you would," he says, hovering over me again. "I'll go now." He doesn't move. "Goodnight." He hesitates another moment, as if expecting me to return it. I turn my back to him, pretending he is gone already. He stays for an awkward moment, before finally leaving, shoulders slumped in defeat. That gives me a glimmer of satisfaction—I have reduced the King to a fluttering boy.

He doesn't close the door behind him; my legs are weak and the fifteen feet across the room spreads out before me like an endless desert wasteland. It takes me an eternity to cross to the door and close it, and even longer to make my way back to the bed. I can hear him puttering around the sitting room for a moment longer, blowing out the candles and muttering to himself. I hold my breath until he is gone, and only when the last door has been shut and I hear his heavy tread down the hall, do I let it out again.

I sink down on the edge of the bed, numb. Not wanting to bother with parting the curtains, I peer through the gap between the linens at the night sky. It must be near midnight, now, I realize. Tantalus and I had gone to bed around eight with the baby. That means my life has been destroyed in just four hours. My horror has not stopped the world from spinning, or even changed the time.

Agamemnon will be going to sleep now; my reaction will have faded in his mind and his victory will make him smile. He has everything he always wanted.

His sleep will be deep and sweet, and I hate him for it. I laugh aloud, realizing that I, too, am expected to sleep. I lean back tentatively on the pillow, close my eyes to see if my body still works. That's when I make the discovery that will torment me for years to come: every time I close my eyes, I live it all again.

I don't sleep that night, or the next, or any other night for two more years.

It took Tantalus and me half a million tries to conceive Agathon, and we tackled the task with gusto. Trust Agamemnon to impregnate me with one rape. My husband's body was not even cold before I was married again. My son had been dead for a scant two weeks before the seed of my rapist took root inside me. I hated myself almost more than I hated Agamemnon.

Giving my body to the spawn of Agamemnon, protecting it, holding it behind my heart…

It was not the baby, but my own self-loathing that made me vomit daily. I was six months pregnant before Agamemnon discovered I was with child. By then, it was a double blow for him; he learned all at once that I truly hated him, and hated the child over whom he was rejoicing.

The Agamemnon I remembered had more sense, but then… the Agamemnon I remembered would never have hurt me so. I had trouble piecing together a clear picture of the Klytie I remembered. The past sixteen years all seemed to have happened to another person; this heavily pregnant shell of a woman could not really have danced on the seashore at Pisa, or loved a boy in the Eurotas River.

Could your mind be wiped clean of all you knew about yourself? It frightened me beyond words and set me pulling down the curtains in daylight and huddling under the covers, knees curled up to my chest as much as my swollen belly would allow. What I truly wanted would never be mine again. But myself, I could still reclaim—if only I could find her.

Sometimes, I wandered the House's dark, empty halls, opening doors and peering inside, as if, in the next one, I would find _Klytie, _a dark, sporty swirl that would inhabit me and make me who I used to be. I never found that missing piece, but I learned worlds about the House's former inhabitants. Agamemnon must have been in such a fever of preparing for me that he forgot to erase the Thyesteid influence.

I found Aegisthus' room and trembled at the essence of the ghastly child who once resided here. The room was black, like death and madness. Black as the midnight hour when Hekate and her spirits roam. The bed is large, as if Aegisthus was often planning on having female guests. All across the room, heads are mounted on the walls. Cat's heads, puppies' heads, torn-open bodies of frogs, and, directly over the bed, eyes frozen in fear, blonde hair matted with blood, hangs Atreus' head. _What kind of monster is this child?_

The room is immaculate, save for the various weapons strewn across the bed. There are knives, what I suppose to be the infamous sword, and a few things I've never seen before—long, shiny, serrated instruments of torture. What in Hades is a seven-year-old doing with these?

The writing desk is prominent, and also swept clean. Going through the drawers, I find what I had missed on the desktop. Bound together with a leather band is a sheaf of papers. Drawings, I realize, on further inspection. There are monsters that rival those fought by Hercules, and a whole page of eyes. Eyes dripping blood, eyes dilated with terror, eyes narrowed in a lion's predatory stare.

Aegisthus draws with a precise, delicate hand, where I at seven couldn't manage to color without shooting my paint off the page.

I shove the papers back in their drawer and leave the room in a frenzy, unsure even as I do so, if I want to open the next door. I know the minute I step inside that this is Tantalus' old room. With the lyre, and the seashell collection, the rich paintings of ocean scenes, it could have belonged to no one else.

I pause for a moment in the doorway, drinking in his smell. Slowly, reverently, I make my way to the bed, easing myself back on it. I bury my face in the pillow, feeling him all over me. That's when the tension leaves my body completely. That's when the memories come flooding back, and I know myself in the way I did that night I introduced myself to Tantalus. That's when I remember the best and most important thing about myself.

_I am Klytie. I belong to Tantalus. _

She was born in the middle of autumn, with a coronet of red-gold curls the color of the leaves and ocean eyes that were all at once every hue of the rainbow and no color at all. She had Aphrodite's complexion, a rosy glow that could never have come from me or Agamemnon. Hope speeds up my heart; I peel back the swaddling, staring at her long and hard. True, her complexion might darken in time—but she would never have my olive skin or Agamemnon's coloring.

Only Tantalus had hair like that, and you could not mix brown eyes and black and get a child who had blue. I thought back to the myriad times Tantalus and I had made love, even after the baby came and we were exhausted. We lived in a constant haze of passionate ecstasy; we had only to feel each other's warmth in the bed before a white-hot fever overtook us.

She was Tantalus' image, flesh, blood and bones. I had no hope of passing her off as Agamemnon's; I held my breath when he came in to see her. After what he had done to Agathon, I could only imagine what he would do to a child of Tantalus born in his House, a child that he had presumed to be his. Agathon might have grown to overthrow his kingdom in vengeance for Tantalus, but no-one worried about girls. The Agamemnon I remembered might have spared her; I could not guess what this man would do.

He barely noticed the baby at first, rushing straight to my side. "How are you feeling?" he asked anxiously.

I could have sworn he was drawing it out on purpose, just to torture me. "Fine," I grunted. _Get on with it!_

At _long _last, he turned to the baby, drawing in an excited gasp. "She's beautiful!" he murmured, taking her in his arms. I caught my breath as he took her, half expecting him to dash her against a wall out of nowhere. But he cradled her in his arms and nuzzled her little throat and cheeks, stroking her hand with a trembling finger. He cooed to her for a moment longer, and then met my eyes over the bundle in his arms.

For one brief moment, he dropped the veil, and I saw into those dark eyes as clearly as I had all my life. _He knew. _There was no mistaking it. My heartbeat wavers for several torturous seconds. Calmly and clearly, Agamemnon says, "My family has Cretan blood. She takes after the fairer side."

I let out the breath I didn't know I'd been holding, careful not to let him see any change in my expression.

"Certainly," I say aloud, my voice steady. "She looks like your father."

Agamemnon allows himself a forced smile. "That's what I thought." He bends to kiss her cheek before raising his eyes to mine once more. "I will let you name her." Is that another kindness, I wonder, or his way of withdrawing from Tantalus' child?

I had never wanted girls; I never had a female name picked out. There is only one choice that leaps to my mind, the one Tantalus chose that night when I was pregnant with Agathon and we didn't yet know what the baby would be.

I was wild with cravings and nursing a concoction of baklava and a Spartan soup whose ingredients included vinegar, boiled pigs' feet and swine's blood. We were famous for that soup and I adored it; Spartan children grew up alternating between the broth and their mother's breast.

Tantalus, like any outsider, called it poison and sat with his back to me, claiming he couldn't bear to watch me put it to my lips. Tears clustered in my eyelashes at the memory; I tried desperately to blink them away.

I missed those days with all my being! I wanted to be bored with him, or throw aside everything to dance in the rain. I ached to have another one of our fights that always seemed to end with us laughing, and eventually in bed. That jerks me back to another of Tantalus' questions for me, back to the endless game he played. _If you knew your life would end tomorrow, what would you do differently? _

The question hits me like a knife and hangs sharp in my gut. If I had known… I would have held him close for an extra minute in the mornings, looked deep into his eyes, and memorized every line of his face. I would have closed my eyes and listened to him talk—_listened, _the way I didn't always do—so that when he was beneath the ground, never to speak again, I would have his every inflection in my head to replay whenever I missed him.

I am jolted back to reality by my husband's sharp voice. "Klytemnestra!"

I realize, as if thinking through a cloud, that I am supposed to be naming my baby. There is only one choice. _His _choice. My throat burns with unshed tears. "Iphigenia," I said hoarsely.

I lingered, numb, in the nursery long after Agamemnon had left. He knew plainly Iphigenia was no child of his; there was no reason why he should spare her. And though it took me long enough, I realized I was his weakness. Like Oedipus of old, he blinded himself when it came to me. It was no great feat of heart and soul, but a method of protection.

It was easier for Agamemnon to lie to himself than to admit the truth: I had never loved him the way he wanted me to, and even though he claimed me now, he had ruined any hope of love between us.

He must know, too, that I could not stomach the thought of carrying his seed inside me; more children would follow, of that I was sure, but I knew already that Iphigenia would be the only one I could ever love. He would soon grow tired of her; as his empire grew, as he accumulated more wealth, he would crave an heir to his glory, and expect me to give him life.

I could not bear to think about _Agamemnon's son, _or the damage I might do to a baby I hated before it was born. Girls were another thing entirely, but what right did that little boy have to live when mine had died in the cruelest way? I had to make myself stop there. I would go mad if I let myself linger on hatred for a child not even conceived!

"I couldn't save your brother," I whispered brokenly to Iphigenia, clutching her too tight against my breast, "but I'll hang on to you. Anyone that wants to hurt you is going to do it over my dead body!" She whimpers slightly, I relax my grip.

For a long moment, I am frozen in the waning sunlight, holding her. I had forgotten, in my marathon of hatred, the way my arms ached for the warm, sweet weight of a baby.

"You're going to have to be patient with me," I say at length. "I love you, but I'm sixteen and I don't have a clue what to do beyond the first month, and we can't trust Agamemnon's moral compass." I settle back against the pillows, ease into a rocking rhythm. "I'm going to make a lot of mistakes," I admit, "and that's something I don't usually confess."

My throat tightens as the enormous responsibility stretched out before me, sinks in. I have never received a mother's love. What if I don't know how to give it? "I'm going to do a lot of things wrong," I say, swallowing hard. "But I hope you always know that however badly I mess up, it was never because of something you did wrong, and never because I didn't love you." A silver tear drips from my eye, soaking into her blanket.

"Your father was my better half," I tell her. "You look just like him; I hope you got all his good qualities. Gods help you if you're anything like me! But no matter what you do, or who you become, I will love you to the moon and back. I will be there for you _forever._"

The tears flowed hot and heavy then, for no reason, and I could not choke them back. I was terrified of upsetting Iphigenia—but she opened her wide blue eyes just then and stared at me calmly, without making a sound, curling her little hand around my finger. I knew then that was how it would be—Iphigenia was the sunshine-sanity in the hurricane of my madness.


	7. Chapter 7

**Hello, my beautiful readers! I've noticed Mystique has been getting lots of hits—so glad so many of you are enjoying my work! But I'd love to get to know you all, and I would especially love to see some reviews! Please? :3 I promise hugs and cupcakes to those who give me feedback…! **

**Love & Lattes,**

**Your Queen of the Asylum,**

**Welcome_To_The_Madness**

At three months old, Iphigenia had just learned to smile, and her coos and giggles kept me in a constant haze of delight. I dropped everything to hang over her cradle; everyone but my baby faded into the background. I loved her fiercely and obsessively; I nursed her myself and refused to let the servant girls take care of her. My daughter was as flawless as a young Aphrodite; she would have nothing less than the perfection she was due.

Agamemnon was away from the House more and more often these days, but he continued to dote on her, bringing lavish presents for both of us from his raids. But my breath still caught in my chest each time he took her in his arms, and it was a habit I never unlearned, though I did eventually smother the urge to bathe her every time after he touched her.

As infatuated with her as he was, however, my prophecy soon fulfilled itself: Agamemnon was getting impatient for a son. He hauled me into our bedroom in the dead of winter and would not let me go until he had pumped me full of his seed. That night, bathing in steaming water and jasmine oil, trying my hardest to wash away his scent, I knew there was no hope that I would not conceive.

Khrysothemis was born imitating Iphigenia. She came in the very middle of the fall, just three days away from Iphi's own birthday, and I could have sworn she planned that in the womb. Those three days seemed to be a portent of the future—Iphigenia would forever be the first, the best, the brightest, and despite all her efforts, Khrysothemis would remain three pitiful steps behind.

She was more clearly Agamemnon's, with shining copper hair and eyes a dark grayish shade that could conceivably result from our coupling. But her eyes lacked the magic spark that sizzled in Iphigenia's; from infancy, when I looked in her eyes, I saw a dull emptiness residing in the placid dark depths. Occasionally, I would nurse her myself, but more and more often, I found excuse to leave her with Khione, the young nurse I'd hired, while I played with Iphigenia.

My angel-child won hearts with her charm, but Khrysothemis lacked that as well, and sought to get her way through demands. Agamemnon quickly lost interest in her and turned his attention to Iphigenia to distract him from the fact that he still didn't have a son. I had never owned _any _interest in her, and soon found myself ignoring her entirely.

Khrysothemis—as only my luck would have it—was a child who would rather be wanted for murder than not wanted for anything at all, and she was hell-bent on getting attention any way she could—whether on a rampage through the House with my cosmetics, (taking only the things that would stain, of course) "decorating" herself, her toys, and everything else that wasn't out of her reach, or screaming at the top of her lungs for no reason.

I loved Iphigenia more when she was as horrified by Khrysothemis' behavior as I was. That about summed it up, I decided one evening while cuddling in bed with Iphi. Tantalus' daughter was a goddess on earth who shrank from the very appearance of evil. Agamemnon's daughter was a pretty little monster.

**4 Years Later**

I knew vaguely that what I did was wrong; people talked of it in whispers and the word "disorder" kept popping up. But they had it all wrong! Because when I cut myself, everything fell right into place.

I was six months pregnant, filled to the brim with Agamemnon's seed. I did not mean to cut myself; if I had, would I not have made the gash right across my swollen stomach? The House had been transformed into Hades' living room by the heat; I crept through the halls of my own House like a ghost, half-naked, searching for darker, cooler territory while Agamemnon mocked my "weakness."

The demon-spawn growing and swelling inside me made me feel like the pig bladders my brothers and I played with as children, filling them up with water and tossing them around to see what would make them pop. I bordered on the verge of popping. I lay naked and sweating on the bare mattress, all the windows open, the curtains pulled back in a desperate declaration of free passage to the half-hearted breeze that might come my way.

Something gleamed on the table at my side; its thin metal edge slashed open a moonbeam that peered hesitantly through my window. Turning over on my side takes almost more effort than curiosity is worth. I grope across the table in the darkness, fumble over the clay jug that stands at the ready to fill my cup of water, my makeshift papyrus fan, and a scroll that turned out to be as interesting as the rising dough in the kitchen, before I find it. _A knife. _

I recognize neither the handle nor the blade as a knife from my collection; perhaps that was what drove me to stare at it for so long. Somewhere along the line, I graduate to picking it up and considering it in my hands, as though I had never before felt a knife. I run my fingers over it, and then, in a stupid test of its quality, I drag the blade lightly over my arm.

Blood bubbles up along the edges of the crack, then severs the final boundary of skin and bursts forth, gushing over the sides of my arm and snaking up to my elbow. I bolt up, grabbing for the cloth of the covers, only to find that they lie in the floor on the other side of my bed, fully and completely out of my reach. In the end, I grab the scroll, wrap it around the length of my arm, and watch as the blood soaks into it.

A smirk tugs at the corners of my mouth; that's about all it was fit for, anyway. Once, I peel back the scroll and peer at the jagged line running across my arm, blood still spurting up at the edges. I quickly clap the drenched papyrus back over it, like a little girl frightened at the sight of blood.

The thought bullies me into peeling it back again; I had always been a strange child, never shielding my eyes at sacrifices the way Helen did, throwing her veil up over her eyes and cringing until every trace of the dreadful red was out of her sight. Again and again, I make myself look at it, until the sight of the cut no longer bothers me. Until it almost turns me on.

The second time, I meant to do it.

I made a parallel cut and nine more just like it, then poked my skin with the tip of the knife, the way I'd seen our cook do with the crust of a fresh-from-the-oven pie. When I was small, I spent long hours in the kitchen of the palace at Sparta, though I never did learn to cook. I would stand behind Mykale as she worked her magic with the pie, watch filling ooze out of the holes in the crust. Little dots of blood poked up from the pricks in my skin and tidal waves of it gushed from the cuts, overlapping and flowing down to my elbow.

_So the pie can breathe, _Mykale had said. I had always liked that concept. I whispered the words to myself as I made one more cut. For the first time since my arrival in Mycenae, the air is easier to draw in. I make another cut on my right arm, and as the blood soaks into the mattress, falls in fat drops onto the imported carpets, I smile.

I'm breathing.

Here is what happens when you cut yourself.

The sweet release of cutting is addictive. The blood is mesmerizing and you grow to even love the sting. You become dependent quickly, unable at first to go a week without it, and that time limit dwindles fast. Minutes will drag into hours as you suffer in silence, wondering if everyone sees your madness.

Are you the only one who feels the burning, as your skin screams for the kiss of the knife? Did they notice when your hand crawled up your sleeve again, clawing frantically to relieve the itch? Do they know how blurry your vision is, as you try to keep your mind away from it? Do they see the throbbing in your head as all that unreleased blood builds up, begging you to make the cut and let it out?

You make an excuse—_(I need to check on the children)_—and when you're sure nobody else is looking, you run, flying down the halls until you find a corner, a cranny, a closet, anywhere to hide your shame. You grab anything you can get your shaking hands on—a fragment of glass, a torn piece of metal, the nearest knife. Your hands are trembling too much; for the very first time, the cut goes too deep.

The blood doesn't stop. It spreads from your wrists to your arms, past your elbows and beyond your shoulders. You sit in the dark in your own blood, shaking, promising yourself you'll never cut that deep again. But you will. You learn to treat the wounds and they grow deeper. Eventually—no matter what you told yourself—you run out of skin on the place you first started and your body becomes a canvas for your cutting.

One day, you get out of the bathtub and look at yourself in the full-body mirror on the door. The cuts run from the nipples of your breasts to your ankles, all the way to the very soles of your feet. You've carved in your wrists, your hips, your knees. Old cuts from years past are an odd shade of silver, while the others that haven't quite made the transition are a dead shade of ghastly white. They all mix together with sick pink scars from months ago and the angry red ones of today. You hate yourself and you feel dirty, ashamed. Other people don't do this! What's wrong with you?

You long to cry but you've forgotten how. So you take your shaving knife from its shelf on the tub and cry in the only way you know. Somewhere between the buzz that comes from the first incision and the little pause between seeing the blood, revulsion kicks in and you start to scream, making wider, deeper cuts, tearing at the peeling flesh with your hands.

You slap your small children when they ask innocent questions about the scars on their Mama's hands. You get defensive and yell at the man who says he loves you when he pulls up your shirt and sees the lines on your breasts. You run away and hide with your knife, choking on revulsion for what you've done to them all. Your poor family—it's not their fault you're crazy.

You babble promises to yourself in the dark, resolutions to quit… Then you feel something sticky between your fingers and realize you've been cutting and you didn't even know it. You give up trying to be normal; that died within the first week of cuts.

You wear long sleeves and long skirts regardless of the weather and stop accepting invitations out. Someone tries to touch you and you jump as though their fingers are slathered in toxin. Does it really hurt that much to be touched, you wonder, or are you just so afraid of them feeling a scar? You wear dark colors and thick fabric, just in case.

Your relationships dwindle to nothing; the only one you maintain is the one with sharp objects. Your self-control vanished when you made the first cut and took your self-respect with it. You no longer see the point in trying—for anything. By this point, you've been cutting for twenty-nine years. Your fingernails are long and sharp and you file them every day to make them sharper—just in case you find yourself somewhere without a backup tool.

The itching has become unbearable; your body is a grotesque maze of scars. Cutting has become your life. You hate yourself and you hate the cuts more. You hate yourself for making the first cut, for throwing yourself down this twisted path. Was there a time when you could have stopped it, you wonder? If you hadn't made the first cut, would you be normal now? You cut even deeper, laughing at yourself. You're fat. You're evil. You're inherently crazy. _You are never going to be normal. _

Beside you, your husband dreams of sex, while your dreams run from erotic fantasies of cutting, to screaming nightmares about being caught. You half want to be caught so the madness can end…but really, you just want to die. You've never told anyone and as far as you know, there's no one else in the world who has done this. No one tells you what to expect when you're caught.

You want to give it up, but you never will. You get drunk on the high, and you do it when you're low. You may have a cunning semblance of a normal life but cutting is really all you know. The question is—will it keep you alive when it drives away all the people you love?

No doubt, Khione meant well when she remarked on how high I was carrying this baby. "It's sure to be a boy!" she exclaimed, her moon-face glowing with excitement. By this time, all Mycenae knew how their king longed for a son. They did not know that the mere thought of a boy made their queen nauseous.

I was not like some of the girls back in Sparta who made a practice of sticking their fingers down their throats, scarfing up every ounce of food in their body in hopes that they could wear a smaller dress or run faster on the race track.

But I had thrown up on purpose far too much in the days since I'd started showing, in hopes that my unsettled stomach would dispel the child from my womb. It didn't. Neither did the wine I drank in excess, alone in the cellar, when the girls were asleep and Agamemnon was out. I was almost six months pregnant and the natural methods hadn't worked. I had one trimester and one way left to rid my body of this thing.

"You waited too long," the old crone said. She had two different-colored eyes, one filmy with blindness, and she resembled nothing so much as a question mark leaning on a walking cane. "You should have come to me when you first conceived."

My throat tightens; I take a desperate step forward into the darkness of her hutch, actually admitting to myself, with that step, that I am doing this. "I've never done this before," I admit. "I didn't know. Please, there must be something you can do for me!"

She cocks her head, peering hard into my face with her one good eye. "I thought Spartan girls did this all the time."

"That's a myth," I said hotly. Just like the one about how Spartan girls are always on their toes or on their backs, and that our temple services are nothing more than drunken orgies. "Well—maybe they do, but…I never did!"

She cracks a smile. "You must understand that this is still what they call a back-alley abortion.

This is no different than shoving a willow wand into your womb and trying to stab the baby." She pauses a moment. "If anything, that's safer. With this, you're basically poisoning yourself and hoping by some miracle, the toxin will kill the child and not you!"

"I'll risk it," I snap. "What do you have?"

There is a cabinet of potions in the corner; she turns toward it slightly, then ambles back around to face me. "Lady Klytemnestra…if I may… You're young and strong, and certainly not without means to provide for a child! Don't take an unnecessary risk."

"You don't understand," I whispered. I bite down hard on my lip to keep back the tears I can almost never control when I think of Tantalus. It's even harder if I think of my baby, so beautiful, so innocent, a life cut so short… I swipe at my eyes with my knuckles, banishing the tears just in time to see the old woman's gaze soften into something almost maternal.

"You lost another child, didn't you?" she asks me gently. I nod. "And now it hurts too much to carry this one?" I cannot fight the gasping sobs then, the humiliating sniffles that I try to suck back. She hobbles forward to lay a gnarled hand on my shoulder. "Forgive me," she murmurs. "Practicalities are worthless in the face of such loss."

"My husband killed him," I sob, burying my face in my hands. I had never let myself cry for Agathon; the loss of him had left me numb, dry, too wrung out to manage a single clear emotion.

The weeks of recovery, of returning to myself, had been Hades, with feeling coming to me in snatches, and always at the worst of times; I was forced to smother the tears when they came in the middle of sex or a court function, or when something about Iphigenia hit me with a sharp memory of her brother, who had not lived even long enough to learn to smile.

"There are," I said fiercely, "some children who should never be born." I rest a hand on my stomach, swollen with my husband's filth. "This is one of them."

She nods and makes her way to the cabinet, rearranging the woven straw baskets and tiny clay bottles on the shelves for several minutes before she finds the one she's looking for. "It's a concoction," she said, "of some of the deadliest herbs, put together in a dosage that should only kill the baby and leave you unharmed." She presses it into my hand, looking hard into my eyes. "You might have waited too long in taking it; I've never known a woman to abort a child at six months. I can't guarantee what will happen—"

"It's worth a try," I said confidently. "Thank you."

She stops me with a firm hand on my wrist. "You don't understand. I don't have a clue in the world what could happen! The child might survive and be grotesquely deformed!" My stomach twists. I had not considered that.

My shock must be evident on my face; she seizes upon it like a vulture on a carcass. "And even if the damage isn't done to its face—think about what this might do to its mind! Your child could be soft in the head, or worse!" And if it was, it would be just like Agamemnon to make me keep it, if he learned what I did.

"Are you trying to talk me out of it?" I demand.

She pauses just a moment, considering. "I guess I am. But only for your sake."

I nod as I head for the door. "Thank you," I whispered, looking deep in her eyes. "For everything."

_I didn't lose the baby. _

I broke the vial into a million pieces, burned the clay shards and buried the ashes; my secret was my own. But so were the thoughts that tormented me night and day. What if the baby had felt it?

Those times when it tossed and turned and hurled itself against my belly—was it writhing in pain? What was in that potion, anyway? Had the poison eaten away at its limbs? Would I give birth to a stump of a child? What if the acid had eaten its eyes and it was born with two gaping holes in its little face?

What if it was born twisted? I had seen such people—hunchbacks, shuffling their way through the alleys. No one wanted them. Agamemnon would never allow it, of course. Like his father and grandfather before him, Agamemnon would hurl a deformed child off Mount Charvati and no one would object—except maybe me.

I wondered why I cared so much. I grew up in Sparta, of all places, where babies were thrown away simply because they were cross-eyed or the family didn't need an extra girl! Mycenae had been an eye-opening experience; I had never seen so many people, or such a variety! Sparta's society was uniform. People walked, talked, dressed and even looked alike.

I had never seen a fat person in my life till I came to Mycenae—fat was not allowed in Sparta. If being cross-eyed was worthy of death, and obesity was scandalous, what would people think if they heard that Klytemnestra bore—and kept!— a _deformed _child? Gods knew it would disgust me; if I could not look at Khrysothemis—and she really was a pretty little thing—whose only crime was bearing too close a resemblance to her father, how could I ever look past the grotesque mask of this child's face and see the soul inside?

I wanted to, truly I did! If it was born defective, thanks to me, it was my responsibility to keep it. How could I leave it to die as punishment for _my _mistake? Over the next three months, I spent so much time worrying about how it might be disfigured, that I forgot to even think about the more terrifying deformity—the one nobody could see.


	8. Chapter 8

The baby was too normal to truly be so.

I had braced myself for grotesque deformities, a little demon child. I all but sliced him open and examined him right there, but found nothing to confirm my suspicions; the child was alarmingly flawless. "Would you like him better if he was sickly?" Agamemnon smirked, as though reading my mind.

"I would like him only if he was dead!" I flung back, realizing that I had thought only of how to get rid of this vermin and given less than a second's consideration to what I would do if it survived. Hideous or beautiful, fit or malformed—I cared not. This little beast was Agamemnon's spawn and I would not have it at my breast. "Take it away from me," I hissed, thrusting the baby at the midwife so sharply that his brains would have been spilled across the carpet if she'd missed. I found myself guiltily wishing that she had.

Agamemnon pushed me to name the little creature, no doubt thinking that I would come to love it if I did. But what about mine and Tantalus' baby? We spent months choosing his name. We loved him, dreamed for him. What had those dreams come to, now? A nameless clump of rotting flesh and ashes.

Agamemnon had destroyed every dream I'd ever cherished and taken most of my maternal instinct with it. It was bad enough that I had to suffer through him every night, that my body had been an unwilling host for his parasite. But I would not give his demon some glorious name or acknowledge its existence a second longer than I had to. After the creature went a month without a name, Agamemnon realized he could not wear me down and finally called his son Orestes— "he who climbs high mountains."

Four-year-old Iphi fell instantly in love with him, as only my luck would have it. She thought he was a wonderful doll, existing for her sheer entertainment, and took to calling him Orrie. The little traitor hovered over his cradle for hours, despite my orders to the contrary, refusing play-dates from her friends to watch him. It wasn't long before the staff and my husband began joking that Iphi was Orestes' real mother. I had never in my life wanted so much to hurt that many people at once.

Orestes remained disparagingly normal until a month or two after his first birthday. Summer was starting to slide into fall on that particular day; there was just enough of a nip to the air that Iphi felt the need to wrap her shawl around Orestes as they played together on the porch. I was watching from one of the stone lions flanking the porch, idly carving my name into its back with the tip of a kitchen knife, while thinking of all the ways Orestes might be injured.

He could tumble off the porch, I decided, though with my luck, he'd probably bounce back then and there. He could get stung by something poisonous, not that that would compare to the pain my Agathon must have suffered before he died. I pressed harder into the lion's back with my knife, slightly guilty for wishing such torture on an infant. Gods knew I'd put him through enough in my womb. Not that it had done any good.

Orestes shrieked out of nowhere just then; I started as though lit on fire, half-afraid that my vengeful fantasies had been made truth. I whipped around to find him writhing on the floor, howling in wordless agony while Iphi fluttered by his side, trying desperately to comfort him. "Mama…!" Iphigenia shrieked. Her own eyes were round with burgeoning tears. "Mama, make it better! What's wrong with him?"

"He's fine," I muttered, swinging down from the lion, knowing I was lying as I assured her, "he's probably just hungry or…tired…or _something."_ Some maternal figure I was. I wouldn't have believed myself, had I heard that at Iphi's age. I did not blame her when I caught the faint glimmer of doubt in her eyes, though both of us refused to acknowledge it.

Orestes screamed like someone was twisting a knife inside him; I had never heard such cries of pain. I crossed the porch and snatched him up. "What in Hades?" I demanded, as if I thought he could tell me. I brushed aside his blanket, shook out his thin shift, searching for a scratch or bruise or some bug that might have bitten him, and came up with nothing. His diaper was dry, he was not too hot or too cold, and he'd woken up from his nap just an hour before.

"What's wrong with him?" Iphi's voice whimpered at my side.

"He's fine," I repeated, shifting the screaming baby to my hip, unable to think of anything but getting the little creature away from me. His fit reminded me of nothing so much as my crazy mother's bouts of madness, which fled just as suddenly as they came, leaving her sweat-soaked and disoriented. I hauled myself up the stairs to his nursery with Orestes wailing and thrashing the whole way.

I had expected to dump him off on Khione, the young nurse, who, gods knew, was no better equipped to deal with him than I was. But Khione was gone when I arrived and did not answer my furious calls that doubtless echoed through half the town. Orestes was crying hard, dribbling snot and saliva down the front of my dress, gods damn him, and I was growing slightly more disturbed than I cared to admit.

"You run on," I told Iphigenia with a reassuring—albeit intensely fake—smile. "I'll take care of him." She eyed me dubiously, as though doubting my parenting skills, before trudging off and clicking the door shut behind her. I stared like an idiot at the screaming baby for a moment before finally settling into the varnished oak rocking chair in the corner.

"Shh-shh…" I whispered, surprising myself at the ease with which I suddenly cuddled him. "What's the matter?" He whimpered, burying his face in the dip of my breasts and hiccupping against my the rough cotton of my bodice. "Did something scare you?" He burrowed closer against me, grunting pitifully, as though trying to answer.

I thought again of my mother, of her nameless dread, the monsters only she could see. What if madness was hereditary? Could the same invisible terrors that dogged my mother be haunting him? Leda had been wild in her ravings, shrieking and throwing everything that wasn't tied down in some moods, cowering and shredding the drapes in others. Her pain had been too deep for words; she could never quite describe it even once she was lucid. I could not even begin to imagine the horror that must be for a baby.

I eased into a rhythm in the rocker, humming to him and rubbing his back. "It's all right," I soothed. "Nothing's going to get you." Orestes chose that moment to grab my hair in his fist, wrapping it around his little fingers and tugging as his eyes, blue as crushed grapes, stared into mine. He trusted me implicitly, counted on me to make his terror go away. I leaned back in the chair, snarling through my clenched teeth. I had not wanted this child to live! I sure as Hades did not want to be his sanity.

_Sanity. _It would figure that my child was mad. The thought hit like a brick to my brain—a possibility I had forgotten. In Sparta, I would have had a three-day window in which to determine my baby's right to live. It was then that the council, headed by my father, would have discovered any deformities and ordered the child's execution, or else deemed it a suitable citizen of Sparta. But what was to be done about those defects that only appeared with time?

There had been a few Spartan mothers whose child had been discovered to be sickly or slow. Even fewer were those labeled mentally unfit. The only one I could recall was a little girl known as "crazy" to the whole town. I never knew her name or what was wrong with her, exactly. I knew only that even at ten years old, she had the mind of a toddler, able only to speak simple sentences. She had never learned to walk.

Her family scarcely dared to venture out in public and I knew her older sisters were forbidden to marry, for fear of passing the defect on to the children of otherwise hardy Spartans. The girl herself was never brought out, and on the rare occasions she managed to toddle into the sunlight, she was quickly dragged back inside and beaten. I had always felt rather sorry for the creature; vaguely, I remembered pausing to speak to her one afternoon on my way to the playing fields, giving her the other half of the candy I'd had in my pocket.

She had been immensely grateful for that simple kindness, I recalled, thinking of how her eyes lit up, how she'd grasped my hands and babbled her thanks. She had been so starved for affection; my stomach had twisted at the thought of what her life must be like every day—shoved aside, ignored, or else slapped around, eternally punished for a flaw she couldn't help. I had made a pattern of visiting her and bringing some flower or candy along, until one day, her mother informed me that she was gone, adding that I should ask my father for the details.

"_That mad child?" Tyndareus repeated when I asked, eyebrows soaring past his receding hairline. "What do you care what becomes of it?" I shrugged and waited for a suitable reply. "They left her on the mountain," he said finally, still disgusted that I cared. "I passed a new law a few weeks ago; defective children are not allowed in Sparta." _

The law had spread like wildfire to the other city-states. Everyone, it seemed, had at least one individual—some had entire families—that were a scourge to the city. Defective only in mind, they had passed initial examinations and governments across Achaea found themselves hog-tied by the burden of the mad, unable to find a legal way to dispose of them. Leave it to my father to come up with a solution.

Tyndareus' law decreed that if a child was found to be defective in any way that manifested itself later in life, it was to be put to death like any other unfit person, with extreme prejudice directed at the mentally ill. I realized that the same could be done to Orestes. If his fit struck again, if it worsened, if time proved him to be crazier than I could even imagine, he could very easily be disposed of. The thought frightened me, for reasons I could not quite explain.

Would Agamemnon kill him or simply throw him out, leaving the poor little thing to function on his own? The latter seemed the cruelest thing to do a lunatic; they were, by definition, mad, unable to take care of themselves.

My father used to say that to be insane was to be 'brain-dead.' _"They feel neither pain or pleasure," _I recalled overhearing in one address to his court. _"They understand nothing of what happens to them. They do not care for life or death." _I wondered how he'd been so sure.

The little mad girl had been grateful enough for some attention. Orestes was certainly terrified by his delusions. They felt plenty, I imagined. It was only that no one cared to see it. Such wretches ought to be taken care of—not that I was naming myself as the person to do so!—or at least killed—though I wanted no part in that, either. Anything but abandoned as my father advocated.

I was stunned to realize that I could not bear the thought of little Orestes alone and cold, frightened and hungry in the middle of nowhere. The world was not kind to madmen. If he did not starve to death or wander into the road to be crushed by a passing chariot; if he did not stumble onto something poisonous or toddle over the edge of a cliff, he could just as easily be snatched up by one of the shadow-creatures that roamed the alleys, abducting helpless people off the streets for their own demented purposes.

I did not want to spend my life caring for a lunatic… but neither did I want to see Orestes so treated. Here at last was the deformity I'd hoped for, and worse than I could ever have imagined…yet I no longer wanted it. I might not have felt so bad about killing a disfigured child…but Orestes' pain was heartbreaking to behold. He was _in there, _he could feel it, and I did not like to think of him suffering. Not when it was my fault.

I gritted my teeth, sucking in a sharp breath through my nostrils. My feelings for him, my desperate vengeance for my dead son, mattered little now. I had damaged this child in a far greater way than simply maiming him; the same people who would not laugh at a blind or crippled child would not hesitate to torment a mad one. If I could not undo the harm I'd caused, I must at least care for him as it ravaged his life.

This was to be my penance.


	9. Chapter 9

**Hello again, my lovelies! My apologies for the long wait on your update! Thanks to those who reviewed, followed and favorited, and, of course, to those who read. Hope you're all having a fabulous new year!**

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Agamemnon remained oblivious, adrift in an elaborate fantasy in which his only son was sane and perfect and his childhood sweetheart was is queen. I might have taken a cut to my wrists a slice deeper if not for my own fantasy of watching his reaction when his dream-world wisped away like dandelion dust. Guiltily, I found myself anticipating the day when Orestes would have another fit and Agamemnon would get to experience it firsthand, realize once and for all the nightmare he had created for himself.

Little Orestes, for his part, had not yet grasped that my affection was a one-time thing reserved for that exclusive and desperate situation. Whatever madness lurked within him, he was just clever enough to howl himself into blue, breathless fit for Khione, only to quiet down in my arms, smiling and giggling as if he'd planned it all along. "I see what you did there," I muttered, as he snuggled in my lap, playing with my earring as if it was some great treasure. "I'm not too happy about it, either. I've got half a mind to _let _you choke yourself!"

"Mama!" he gurgled, pulling himself upright by my hair and standing shakily on my legs.

"Yeah, yeah," I mumbled. "Ow!" I dislodged his pudgy hands from my braid and wrapped them instead around my neck. "I have little dignity left by this point, but I'll thank you to not mutilate my hair."

He responded by bouncing gleefully on my legs, tugging my neck with every jump. I glared. He shrieked with delight and pulled the corners of my mouth into a smile. I stuck out my tongue, grinning slightly and he dissolved into such a paroxysm of giggles that he tumbled off my lap and into the carpet. His lower lip suddenly started to tremble and his wide eyes filled with burgeoning tears.

"You're all right," I murmured, picking him up and kissing him. "Be a brave boy for Mama." He nodded soberly and cuddled into my breast, sucking his thumb for reassurance. "You're all right," I repeated, stroking his hair.

He didn't make it easy to hate him, gods damn it.

Agamemnon pumped me full of his seed without ceasing; Orestes was four when my contraceptives failed for the first and last time. Thought otherwise outwardly normal, Orrie had grown clingy in the past few years. Iphigenia doted on him constantly and he had me practically at his beck and call every minute—not that I would ever, for a moment, have let on. He was none too thrilled when my stomach swelled again with Agamemnon's vermin and I was too fat—to say nothing of being sick at fifteen minute intervals throughout the day and night—to hold him.

I resembled nothing so much as a beached whale and passed every minute of each day in self-loathing. I had never allowed myself to be sedentary for so long, but my body refused to obey my orders, and all the drugs in the world would not soothe my stomach. I threw up every morsel of food I choked down, and most liquids as well. Morning sickness! I scoffed at the misnomer. What I'd give if it was only in the morning! If this brat didn't hurry up and get out on its own, I was liable to tear it out with my bare hands.

Orrie was keeping me company on that blustery day, apparently undisturbed by my dark room and blacker moods. But after almost three hours, he had grown suddenly quiet. "Are you tired?" I asked, shifting slightly on my side. "You don't have to stay with me all day."

He shook his head and snuggled as close as he could get to me, despite my bloated stomach. "I don't want you to have a baby," he said after a long pause.

I cracked a smile. "I don't particularly want to, myself." There was no conceivable purpose for this child. Agamemnon did not need another son and he sure as Hades did not need another daughter. Yet he kept me away from the alcohol and medicines, as if fearful that I would try to destroy the fetus rather than carry it to term, a fact that alarmed me more than a little. Did he suspect what I'd done to Orrie? A cocked an eyebrow at my son. "How come _you_ don't want me to have it?"

He buried his head in my shoulder, clinging tightly to my neck. "_I'm _your baby!"

I stared for a moment, blinking. I don't know what I expected him to say, but that wasn't it. "Oh Orrie…" I muttered, awkwardly wrapping an arm around him. "It's going to be all right."

"No, it isn't!" he cried and burst into tears.

Gods damn it. I forced myself upright and pulled him to my breast. "You will always be my baby," I told him, kissing his hair, surprised to realize that I meant it. "I won't love you any less once it's born, you know." Who in Hades was saying these things? I could have sworn it wasn't me!

Orestes' indigo eyes bulged. "You love me?" he asked, lip quivering.

I realized then that I had never said it before, to either of my children, realizing further that it was doubtless because I had never heard it, growing up. Affection was never expressed in my house, physically or verbally.

I was much more free about touching my children, doing special little things for them than either of my parents had ever been, but somehow actually telling them I loved them was more painful than pulling eye-teeth. How very easy it was for me to slip into the role of Tyndareus: cold, austere, pragmatic. I shuddered at the thought and hugged my son. "Yes," I told him. "I love you. Very much."

The baby was a girl, and the image of Agamemnon at that. I almost vomited again when they cut her out of me and held her up for my inspection. Here was the child I had feared all along. Not Orrie or my Iphigenia, for whom I had been so afraid, but this little bastard, every bit as dark and demanding about my husband. "Take it away from me," I hissed at the midwife. "I will not look upon it again. And you may inform my husband that neither will I lie with him again in this lifetime."

I heard through the servant girls that Agamemnon had called the brat Elektra—"brilliant." How very like him, I thought, grinding my teeth until one gave way to the pressure. I stuck half my fist in my mouth, easily dislodging the bloody thing and tossing it away as I would have liked to cast off my husband and children. This was my life, I reflected, pinned by the crushing horror. But at least I was no longer Agamemnon's broodmare, endlessly bearing his spawn.

I thought of the rumors I had heard of King Priam, across the Aegean Sea in Troy, who supposedly had fifty sons. I could not imagine having so many children in one house, or being the woman to bear them. Gods knew these four of mine felt like four thousand already.

The baby screamed without ceasing. Not a cry here and there or a period of crying; not Orrie's fits of hysteria, either—unbroken, colicky howls that paused for nothing. She was impossible to feed as she would not stop screaming long enough to nurse and choked herself on the milk, screaming and coughing till her little face went purple and everyone half-hoped she would pass out.

For six months this went on and Iphigenia was beginning to fear that her mother would order the child killed if it stayed around to irritate her much longer. Therefore, the responsibility was hers. Iphi had a theory and she was fairly certain it would work. The nursery was empty when she entered it; Khione and the other maids no longer bothered staying with the baby. By this point, no one could stand to.

Iphigenia crossed the room to the cradle. "Hey there," she whispered, leaning down to stroke the screaming child's face with a finger. Khione was much like her mother in her attitude; once Khione made up her mind about something, that was simply the way things stood. And if Khione had decided she hated this baby, she wasn't going to spend one minute more in taking care of it than she absolutely had to. She doubted anyone had ever paid the child any attention.

"What's wrong?" she crooned, lifting the baby out of the cradle and into her arms. "Why are you so upset, hmm?" Iphigenia rocked gently as she paced the room. "It's all right, sweetheart…" The baby's screamed lessened slightly and she stared up at Iphi with wide brown eyes. "Yes!" Iphi crooned, kissing her. "You're all right. Calm down." She rubbed her hand in slow circles on the baby's back, humming a lullaby as she went. By degrees, just as she had figured, the cries dwindled to a jerky hiccupping on Iphi's shoulder.

"There," she murmured, easing into the rocking chair. "You just needed some attention, that's all." Quite frankly, Iphigenia had never blamed the child for screaming so. She didn't doubt that the poor little thing knew exactly how unwanted she was; if Iphigenia had ever felt that way, she was certain she would have cried, too. The baby snuggled into Iphi's budding breasts; Iphigenia smiled and kissed her as she rose to find a bottle to give her. No doubt, she was starving and exhausted.

"Here we are," Iphi sang, settling back into the chair and tucking her feet under her as she held the bottle to the baby's lips. As predicted, she began feverishly sucking. Twice, Iphi re-filled the bottle from the warm pitcher of goat's milk on the dresser, until she feared the child's stomach might burst and put the bottle away. "That's better, isn't it?" she whispered, smiling. She started to rock and little Elektra was asleep on her shoulder in a matter of minutes.

Iphi managed to smile serenely rather than smirking, as she wished, when Khione came back, drawn by the lack of noise. Only when Khione left in a dither, no doubt to fetch Klytemnestra, did Iphigenia allow herself the freedom to giggle in disgusted triumph.

Accomplishment as it was, much as she enjoyed it, it was not her responsibility. Not that she minded for herself—Iphi loved babies and looking after them. If anything, she felt sorry for her mother, who was missing out, and for the children, suffering from her neglect. It wasn't fair to anyone. Her mother hired others to do her job for her and clearly, they weren't doing their job anymore than was Klytemnestra herself. It only made sense for Iphigenia to step in.

One look at her mother's face, however, told Iphi Klytemnestra did not share her opinion. "What are you doing?" her mother hissed.

"I made her stop screaming, Mama," chirped Iphigenia with an innocent smile.

"This is not your place," Klytemnestra retorted, completely ignoring Iphi's progress.

"You're right," Iphigenia flung back. "It's yours. You ought to be in here, not me. But you won't."

"GET OUT!" Klytemnestra bellowed.

Elektra stirred in Iphi's arms; Iphi rocked her back to sleep and raised a warning finger to her mother, glaring daggers. "No," she told her mother simply. "There's no reason I can't be in here, short of your own pride and guilt. Father would fight you on it if I told him, and he'd win. He's proud of me for taking care of them, as much as he's furious with you for not!"

Snarling like a caged lioness, Klytemnestra retreated, looking as if she'd like to hurl Iphi and Elektra both into the depths of Tartarus. Iphigenia shook her head at the resounding slam of the nursery door and kept rocking. It was nice to know she'd done some good in the world.


	10. Chapter 10

Orrie was eight when it happened.

The madness I had long suspected appeared only when I dropped my guard, almost as if punishing me for my weakness, for assuming my sin would not come back to haunt me. It was too much to ask, of course, for the blow to come easy and when I expected it. The curse must bide its time, waiting for me to develop feelings and strike when I loved Orestes enough to take his madness on itself—when all the pleading in the world, all the inward anguish would never be enough to save him.

The only thing that mattered now, the only thing that ever would, was what I had done to him eight years ago. That knowledge pulsed through the pain, furthering the guilt. My pain was unending, unfathomable, and I could not foresee a cure.

By his tenth birthday, the voices in his head had turned my sweet, bright-eyed little boy into a puppet of his delusions. The fits left him weak and limp as a rag doll, unable to even wipe up the drool pouring from his mouth. His eyes swam around his head, never settling on anything, and his fingers fluttered in his lap like crippled birds. Orestes radiated insanity.

Mad though he was, my son was not stupid. He understood more than I wanted him to and it cut him to the quick and fed his paranoia. He knew full well that people looked down on him; if they didn't think he was a sideshow freak, they thought him more simple-minded than a baby. Whatever their opinion, the one thing everyone—including Agamemnon—agreed on was that he belonged locked up and hidden away.

He could barely sit up; I _needed_ to put him in a highchair to feed him, but more than anything, he hated being restrained. The one time I tried, he threw the most monumental fit to date.

Orestes cared more about my opinion than that of the whole world put together; what bothered him, I later learned, was not his fear of being confined, but the thought that I too wanted him "locked up." How could I fault him for that? Ever after, I held him on my lap to feed him. My dining room was destroyed with every meal, but Orestes was content, so I learned to ignore the stains on my tablecloths.

It was unbridled cruelty that fueled Agamemnon's order for Orestes to be confined to a large crib. He called it a safety precaution. I had seen his fits, hadn't I? What kind of mother was I to put him in a bed where he could fall out and break every bone in his body? The crib would keep him safe.

It would also unravel the last shred of sanity Orestes was desperately clinging to, and that was just what Agamemnon wanted. Orestes was humiliated and furious and frightened to death, all at once. He wept bitterly and ranted, a trail of broken ramblings that only I understood, but Agamemnon stood firm, and dragged me to bed with him, leaving Orestes alone for the night. My husband slept soundly, but I was awake every agonizing second, feeling my son's pain with every sob that echoed through the House's halls.

I had always looked after him myself; what other choice did I have? I didn't trust him with Khione, who now made signs to ward off evil every time she saw Orestes. True, she could sew doll clothes, mediate disputes, and answer questions about the gender of an earthworm all at the same time, where I could do none of those things; her help was invaluable to me. But I was under no illusions about my staff.

When it came to Orestes, the second I was out of earshot, Khione and the maids would leave him in his crib to scream his head off, and the poor child would go cold and hungry, left in his own filth until I returned. Leaving him in someone else's hands would never have been my choice. But Agamemnon took his cruelty one step further, daring to restrict the hours I was allowed to spend with Orestes. He was being gracious, I was informed, to allow me the luxury of finding someone to care for him in my absence.

As far as I was concerned, the person right for handling him in my absence did not exist. The Spartan perfectionist within me dreaded the process of interviewing nurses. It would be a tedious and complicated procedure; many women in the town would jump at the prospect of a palace position but flee the minute they saw Orestes.

I did not relish the thought of the tales they would spread throughout Mycenae, and though I refused to admit it even to myself, I didn't want everybody to know that Klytemnestra had spawned this pathetic child. Granted, lunatics were something of a routine in Mycenaean royal families, but the insane were an embarrassment wherever you lived.

I wasn't worried for Elektra, now four; gods knew with her complexion and that temper, she'd never attract anybody worth marrying anyway. Eleven-year-old Khrysothemis' head was filled with nothing but boys and parties; the girls' tutor had already complained to me about her empty-headedness, and I pulled her out of school. She was barely literate and couldn't do the simplest arithmetic, but I had no doubt that she would flirt and flutter and connive her way into a marriage with the rich young son of some king.

But what about Iphigenia? At twelve years old, she was exquisite, possessing an uncommon beauty that was already turning heads and causing men to liken her to Helen, who had come to have a reputation as the most beautiful woman in the world. If word got out about my lunatic son, would suitors, fearing tainted blood, shy away from her? What if, because of this one venture, my golden child was doomed to a life of spinsterhood?

In the end, I gave up and began my search, and it was just as I'd expected. I didn't have to wait and weed them out. The first, a thin, sour-faced woman, began to back toward the door and mutter excuses as soon as I described Orestes' symptoms.

The second might have done well enough, but I still wasn't satisfied. She, too, backed off, sparing me the trouble of dismissing her as a candidate. It went on—the adolescent girl who had no experience with children, sane or otherwise, the middle-aged woman from the alleys who bore too close a resemblance to the rejects of society I had seen creeping through the shadows in Sparta, the ones who used babies for sex games.

I went through no less than seventy-five women and had given up hope when she came to the door. She had a sweet round face and a smile that people couldn't help but respond to. It radiated sweetness and sunlight and though she smiled all the time and at everybody, you felt like it was a gift she gave specially to you. I caught myself returning her smile without thinking. "I'm Kilissa," she said in a voice like honey, extending her hand.

Her eyes sparkled like candles in the window of a house, reaching out to a child long gone on a journey, inviting them to return home. I had never seen anyone with such loving eyes. "Klytemnestra," I returned, shaking her hand. Something about this woman made me want to throw away the formalities. In something softer than my usual sneer, I asked, "Are you here about the position?"

"I am," she said, smiling again. "Unless you've filled it already…?"

"Not at all," I reply. "I'd actually given up hope of ever filling it!"

A cloud passes over her features just then and she links her hands together. "If you'll excuse my bluntness, Lady, let's be honest with each other. I understand you already have a woman for your other children; you wouldn't be needing someone else for your son if something wasn't…amiss."

I nodded. "Orestes isn't right in the head. Nobody seems interested in taking care of a mad child."

Kilissa's eyes grow deep with sympathy. "Tell me about him."

When my father was shocked, he used to say "I'm floored." I now understand why. I am frozen to the floor for a moment, unable to do anything but blink at her. "That's it?" I ask, incredulous.

"Lady Klytemnestra…" She heaves a sigh. "I had a sister, very dear to my heart, who was mad. She was older than me, the pretty one; all my life, I'd looked up to her. The madness struck her the day she turned sixteen. Out of nowhere, she started hearing voices, suspecting irrational things.

My father was so upset, he took to beating her. I guess he thought he could drive it out of her, but it never left. She used to dance, and laugh and sing, but the voices just…" Kilissa gropes for words. 'They _drained _her. They turned my sister into an old woman at sixteen! My mother had seven other children; she expected Marpessa to either function or stay out of the way." Kilissa bites down hard on her lip.

"They didn't have time to take care of her. So I would help her put her dress on—she needed my help to get her arms through the sleeves. I carried her food to her, because her hands were so shaky, she would drop the plate in the three feet between the kitchen and the table."

A moment passes, Kilissa swipes a tear from her eye. "Marpessa was the sweetest thing, but when the voices had hold of her, she went wild. She didn't know where she was. She didn't know me. She saw things that weren't there and tried to set herself on fire." Kilissa's brilliant smile hinges on bitter. "I am well acquainted with madness, my Queen."

For a moment, I can scarcely breathe, unable to believe that I might have found just the person I was looking for. "Not many people understand," I say at length. 'They're frightened by madness or—"

Kilissa made a disgusted little noise in the back of her throat. "Afraid!" she scoffs. "They don't understand how the poor thing is suffering! They're the ones who are afraid, but nobody bothers to look deeper!" She pauses a moment, looking deep into my face. "Tell me about him," Kilissa coaxes, and when I begin with a list of his symptoms, she politely interrupts me. "He's more than his condition to you," she says gently. _"Tell me about your son."_

As far as I was concerned, she was hired from that moment.


	11. Chapter 11

Four-year-old Elektra sucked in a sharp breath and melted into her narrow mattress, pulling the covers over her head and holding them in place with trembling fingers. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and realized too late that she had not spared herself a hand with which to cover her ears. More than hiding, more than not seeing, Elektra was desperate to block out the sound of her parents' screaming voices, her mother's rising loud and vengeful above Papa's.

Elektra could barely contain her fury. She had no right to yell at Papa like that! He worked so hard all day, helping the people, looking after his kingdom, and came home to _her _ screaming at him for things that weren't even his fault! Elektra squeezed the covers tighter as he clenched her teeth, wishing she was big and brave enough to run in there and make that bitch leave Papa alone.

She paused just slightly in her rage to consider how angry Iphi would be if she heard her say that word out loud, especially about their mother. For the moment, Elektra decided she didn't care. Papa called her that and he was right—she deserved it. But she couldn't stand up to Klytemnestra just yet, so she swallowed her burning ache to do so and tiptoed down the hall to Iphi's room, tapping lightly on the door before pushing it open anyway. "Iphi?" she whispered through the darkness.

There was a faint moan from the canopy bed as a few silky blankets twisted and tossed and Iphigenia propped up one arm. "Ellie? What is it?"

Elektra crossed the room to the bed and, peeling back the covers, curled up beside her sister, wrapping Iphi's arms around her. "I can't sleep. They're too loud."

Iphigenia heaved a sigh. "You just have to turn your mind off. Not pay attention to it. I learned that a long time ago."

"But it's not fair!"

"To who, Ellie?" There was an odd catch in Iphi's voice that Elektra did not quite understand.

"Us," she whispered, then, with some hesitation, added, "Him."

"You think it's all her fault?"

"It _is!"_

Iphi sat straight up, suddenly awake. "It is _not," _she hissed, in a voice so low and cold and determined Elektra was frightened of her. "Don't you ever say that, you understand me? You don't know what it's like for her. You don't know what he's done. You can't accuse her, Elektra. You don't _know _her."

Elektra could not even begin to think of what to say. Iphi was probably right, as usual, but so was she! It _wasn't _right for Klytemnestra to treat Papa like that. Whatever he'd done, surely she could get over it and forgive him. She was the one hurting the family, not him! She was the one who kept everybody up at night, who started all the fights and threw things when she got angry. Elektra couldn't stand to see Iphi defending her. But she was tired and tired of fighting. She especially did not want to fight with Iphi.

So she said, "All right," and heaved a sigh, burying her ears in Iphi's pillows, falling asleep to the hum of her parents' anger buzzing through the walls.

Menelaus blew in with a Mycenae wind, on one of those nights unique to this region, where the weather could not make up its mind and hung, fluttering between stormy and calm, like someone about to sneeze. He arrived with mussed hair, blurry eyes and a snotty nose, looking as if he hadn't slept in weeks and went without bathing for longer, and demanded to see Agamemnon immediately. I went as well, out of sheer curiosity, and got a good laugh for my effort.

At twenty-three, he looked exactly like the sniveling sissy I remembered from the first day I met Agamemnon, the child I had been only too happy to ignore. Helen, as I recalled, had thought him "adorable," and "a perfect little pet" and taken him under her wing, as his shocking red hair and babyish lisp had "enchanted" her. I had spent a good decade and a half wanting to tell Menelaus so, particularly after Helen married her little lapdog out of sheer desperation, despite the fact that half of Achaea's princes had come to woo her.

The decision, in the end, had belonged to Tyndareus who knew from stinging experience that women like Helen were unmanageable, and chose the path of least resistance. Agamemnon's baby brother, living on the High King's charity with no power and not a drachma to his name, would make a nice pawn for my father and a pretty puppet for Helen in the meantime. Judging by the news I'd gleaned from Sparta over the years, Menelaus had failed miserably in both areas, though he had, by some miracle, managed to saddle Helen with two children.

The question, in my opinion, was not one of keeping my sister's legs spread for the act or even convincing her to spread them in the first place—but rather, whether the pathetic boy could even penetrate her. Of course, I reminded myself, it was Helen, who had doubtless been penetrated so many times already that if Menelaus had even aimed in her remote direction, some sperm was certain to take root.

Agamemnon's lips quirked in amused disgust at the sight of his younger brother. "Menelaus?" he smirked. "Are you feeling all right?" It was one of the rare times when I was forced to concede a grudging admiration for my husband in one area—no matter how old he got or what he had made of himself, one word of Agamemnon's could never fail to reduce Menelaus to a fumbling child, as if he didn't do a good enough job of that on his own.

"You haven't heard?" Menelaus croaked. His voice was wet and thick, as if he'd recently been crying. "About Helen?"

"I don't much keep up with your misadventures in matrimony, my dear brother," Agamemnon returned, smirking. "I'm a bit busy ruling an empire."

Menelaus glared daggers. "She's gone."

Agamemnon cocked an eyebrow. "This is note-worthy?"

"_Sweetheart," _I said, coaxing a maternal tone, "I imagine she's gone every night. Did you just now catch her?"

I just barely glimpsed Agamemnon's smirk out of the corner of my eye, a silent token of praise he would never have awarded to my face. "You're right," he agreed, without looking at me. "Do you remember the summer we went to visit them in Sparta? He asked if she wanted to go out and have some fun, and she said—"

"_I'll leave the door unlocked for you if I get back first!"_

"And off she went!"

"He didn't even stop her!" It seemed vaguely fitting that the first laugh we'd had in fifteen years should be at our pitiful siblings' expense.

"You don't understand!" Menelaus spluttered, fairly shaking with rage. "Agamemnon! Do you remember the Trojan expedition? They came first to Mycenae and then to—"

"Sparta. What of it?"

"You got the news of our grandfather's death, same as I did…"

Agamemnon's jaw went slack. "By all the gods," he breathed. _"Tell me _you didn't leave her alone with the Trojan princes!"

Menelaus hung his head. "And now she's gone…. Prince Paris… She ran away with him to Troy!"

"Of course she did!" Agamemnon yelled, his face already purple with rage. "What woman wouldn't, with such an ass of a husband!"

"You left Klytemnestra alone—!"

"_Not with a Trojan prince! _And unlike your wife, Klytemnestra isn't a whore!"

Menelaus opened and closed his mouth pitifully, searching for an acceptable defense, realizing that there was none to be found. "She's gone," he sniffled, a frightened child robbed of his favorite toy. "Help me get her back, Agamemnon!"

It was well past midnight when I withdrew from their debate, Menelaus pleading and Agamemnon swearing he was a disgrace to the House of Atreus, calling up all the family ghosts. I retreated to the balcony just off my bedroom, the overlooking the bay of Argos. When a light breeze made the curtain billow out and dance, I could see Orestes, curled into a fetal position in my bed. Every now and then, he would twitch and mutter in his sleep, but I was too tired to run to his side each time. If it turned serious, I would know. There was no mistaking Orestes' fits.

Agamemnon came upon me without sound, just the way he'd come to me at Pisa. Everything made me think of that night. I had always thought if I spent a lifetime with him, I would look at him and remember my childhood friend. But those memories were gone, as if they'd had happened to different people in another world. These days, I was inclined to believe they had.

I heard the crunch of my baby's head against stone in the slapping of his sandals on the tile, Tantalus' last wheezing gasp, in his snoring. Every moment in his presence was one more form of torture. Once, there had been a time when he knew it, and it crushed him. Now, I was pretty sure he liked it. We had two murders, four children, and twelve years of agony between us. Could we really be only twenty-eight?

"May I stand here?" he asks me politely.

I shrug without turning to look at him. "Your porch."

"I didn't want to disturb you," he murmurs.

"If you didn't want to disturb me, you should have left me in Pisa."

He heaves a sigh, squeezing his eyes tight shut before getting so close to my face that I have no choice but to look him in the eyes. Our brief laugh in the living room is over, gone as if it never happened. "When are you going to be over that?"

"_Over it? _That was my _family!_ They were _murdered! _I am _never _going to be "over it!" From the bed, Orestes turns toward the sound of my voice, holding out his arms in my direction. I should go to him. But I don't.

Agamemnon waits a moment, processing this information, then quickly and smoothly changes the subject, as if determined to carry on a civil conversation. "This is classic Menelaus," he says at length. "He wants me to muster every army in Achaea and attack Troy. _My _forces, against an undefeated city, for the purpose of gaining his wife."

He spat over the balcony in undisguised loathing. "When Troy falls," he continued, as if stating a pre-determined fact, "I control everything. I get the town, all the spoil, and I'm crowned King of the Aegean." He turns to me, eyes glowing with excitement. "Do you know what that means? _I will control the world!"_

"And Menelaus gets nothing."

Agamemnon laughs, a nasty sound. "He gets Helen!"

"He's going to hate you."

Agamemnon shrugs. "I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Besides, by the time he figures it out, he'll be up to his eyeballs in debt to me. There's nothing he can do about it."

"How kind of you."

He rolls his eyes. "Peace is for the weak, Klytemnestra. If there's one thing I've learned about life, it's that you'll never get anything if you don't take it for yourself. No one is looking out for you, but you."

I smile bitterly. "Do unto others before they do unto you."

"Smartest thing your father ever said." The silence drags on between us for many awkward minutes before Agamemnon finally says, "It will take months to launch this ridiculous expedition, but when I do, I don't know how long I'll be gone. I want you to rule in my absence."

I jerk as though struck by lightning. "You—what?"

"You're good with that stuff, Klytemnestra; you have much more of a taste for it than do I." I stare at him, mouth open wide. Words elude me. He grins, the first real smile I've seen out of him in ages. "You make me miserable, you little bitch, but I trust you with my kingdom." I manage a nod. "Klytie…" he says very softly, at length, "what went wrong with us?"

I cut my eyes at him, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of answering, or softening. "It couldn't have anything to do with you murdering my family…"

His eyes are soft and moist just then in a way I have not seen since we were children together. "I went about it all the wrong way," he says. "I see that."

"It's taken you twelve years?"

He lowered his eyes, fumbling for words and licking his lips. "I'm trying…" he murmured, looking like a recalcitrant child before its mother, begging for a second chance.

In another life, I would never have put him through this. He had never been any good at words, at expressing emotion, and though I was the more skilled of the two of us, I wasn't much better. I knew the awkwardness, felt his shambling pain. But there was no apology great enough to move me to forgiveness, no amount of time that could soften my heart.

"Klytie," he pleaded, "you have to understand! All I ever wanted, from the moment I met you, was to make you mine forever. And now…" He shaves his head, as though clearing his words from both our minds in an attempt to start again. "My mother told me a story when I was little, about a child who loved songbirds so much he caught one and put it in a cage so he could hear it singing all the time. But the bird was so miserable, it never sang again, and died of a broken heart in that cage. I should never have tried to cage you, Klytie. I wanted to have you—but not like this."

I am paralyzed, unable to say anything, but he takes my silence for indifference, and babbles on, tripping over his words. "And now I'm going to be gone for gods know how long… I didn't want to leave you this way. I wanted things to be…different between us."

Out of the corner of my eye, I study him. And for the first time, I see something other than the monster who stalks me in my living nightmare. Standing before me is the frightened boy who escaped from the charnel house that was Mycenae, and fled to my arms because there was no one else but me. I see the boy who had so much to prove, who was let down by everyone who ever meant anything to him, who holds himself responsible for it all.

For just a moment, I see what it is like to be Agamemnon. "How does it feel to be at the top?" I ask him. "Is it everything you wanted?"

"It feels like being on the edge of a cliff. If you take one wrong step, you'll fall." He searches my face, as though the answer to his question can be found within it. "Is this what I've worked for, Klytemnestra? To teeter on the edge of a precipice? To live in a glass bowl, on display for the world? To have everything and nothing at all?" He gnaws his lip, clenches his hands into fists. "It is nothing like what I envisioned. And there is…no one to turn to, no one to trust, no one to help me remember who I really am."

"Then why do you do it?" I ask gently. I had forever been his counselor, the one he went to to sort out his life. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed our talks, and I refused to admit that I was almost enjoying this one.

"I don't know!" he blurts, eyes wild. "I have no talent in the courtroom, that's plain enough to everyone! I grew up doing this twisted dance of hiding your emotions, manipulating the situation… Over and over, Atreus told me never to trust anyone. I'm sick unto death of it, Klytie!"

He stalks the balcony, hands clenched at his sides. "I'm comfortable on the battlefield. It's the one place I really feel like I know what I'm doing. And this war against Troy…" He whirls around to face me, eyes sparking with hope. "This will be my greatest battle yet, and the payoff is _enormous._" He laughs aloud. "I'm actually excited about this!"

"You should be," I said evenly. "You have the reputation as the greatest warrior in Achaea. The world watches you; they admire your power. Troy has never fallen.

If anyone could take it, it's you." This is the first compliment I've given him in twelve years; he pounces on it.

"Thank you."

He went to his own room, and I back to mine; sharing a bed just now would be going too far, especially when we had not done it for the four years since Elektra's conception. No doubt he sprawls among the heavy fleeces and decorative pillows, while I teeter on two inches of mattress, to keep from disturbing Orestes. But through the walls that separated us, I felt the dark fading to a softer shade of gray.


End file.
